HISTORY IN ART

Language: Any language. Examples in Chinese, French, Italian, Korean, Russian, Spanish

Proficiency Level: Intermediate, Advanced

Brief description of the activity: Students will analyze three paintings by a target culture artist that depict important events in the history of the target culture. They will write and present a short description of the event depicted in one painting and its historical significance to the target culture.

Objectives:

1. Students will be able to interpret important events in the history of the TC based on artistic representations.
2. Students will be able to activate prior knowledge of target culture history to help them understand historical works of art.
3. Students will develop presentational communication skills.
4. Students will be able to use what they already know to help them learn new information more quickly and effectively.

Language focus: Speaking, Listening

Materials: Pictures of paintings of important historical events
Examples of paintings that could be used for the modeling of the learning strategy:

• For a Chinese class: (The K'ang-hsi Emperor's Second Tour of the South) by Wang Hui. http://iws.ccccd.edu/Andrade/WorldLitI2332/noneuro/GRP9_10.jpg
• For a French class: "Portrait of Louis XIV" by Hyacinthe Rigaud
• For an Italian class: "The Battle of San Romano" by Paolo Uccello http://www.uffizi.firenze.it/Dipinti/uccelbattE7.html
• For a Korean class: "1446 Proclamation of the Korean Alphabet"
• For a Russian class: "Èâàí Ãðîçíûé è ñûí åãî Èâàí" (Ivan the Terrible and his son Ivan) by Ilva Repin http://www.rollins.edu/Foreign_Lang/Russian/repin2.jpg
• For a Spanish class: "Guernica" by Pablo Picasso http://www.pbs.org/treasuresoftheworld/guernica/gmain.html

  Procedures:

  1. Introduce the content
     Tell learners that they are going to analyze three paintings that depict an important event in the target culture history and write and present a short description of the event shown in one painting and its historical significance to the target culture.
  2. Introduce and model the learning strategy
     Tell learners that they are going to analyze three paintings that depict an important event in the target culture history and write and present a short description of the event shown in one painting and its historical significance to the target culture.
     
     Explain that Use Background Knowledge means to think about and use what you already know to help you do a task and to make associations. When studying works of art that refer to historical events, students' knowledge of history can help them learn the new material.
  3. Practice
     Show color OH slides of three new images and, in small groups, ask students to identify the historical events and to try to explain what the artist was trying to convey in the painting. Have learners write and present a short description of the event depicted in one painting and its historical significance to the target culture. Ask them how using their background knowledge helped them complete the task.

  Expansion

  1. Follow up with a change in genre by choosing two or three poems that reflect historic events. Students identify the event and interpret the poem in the light of the historic background they are already familiar with.
  2. Have learners use background knowledge to complete another language learning task.
  3. In pairs, students make a list of ways they can use background knowledge to complete tasks in Social Studies, Math, Science, Language Arts, Music and Art.

  Teacher Resources (to help teacher enhance activity):
  Teachers can find pictures of paintings on the Web and print them out for class use.