Welcome to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s Learning through Art online curriculum! This curriculum resource is co-developed with museum educators are area teacher fellows. To learn more aobut the collaborative work with area classroom educators, check out our teacher fellows:https://www.mfah.org/education/kinder-foundation-education-center/kinder-foundation-learning-through-art.

Our curriculum:

• Connects the MFAH’s encyclopedic collection with your subject matter
• Develops students’ higher-order thinking skills
• Offers free, TEKS and STAAR-aligned lesson plans

Learning Through Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston connects the Museum's collections of world art into classroom curriculum for art, language arts, math, science, and social studies. LTA/MFAH bridges disciplines and curriculums to enable students to explore key concepts in the real world context of the art museum while teaching literacy and writing skills, math, science, and social studies. Use the Museum’s elementary and middle school lesson plans to integrate higher level cognitive skills, such as observing and organizing information, making predictions, and communicating ideas and thoughts with art inquiry methods to ultimately promote the students’ development of 21st-century skills that are needed to succeed in the world.

Through discussions on works of art from the MFAH collections and hands-on art projects using everyday materials, LTA/MFAH teacher training introduces TEKS and STAAR-aligned lessons that use the visual arts to teach students how to think critically and creatively as well as encourage self-confident, self-motivated, and self-disciplined learners.

Learn more about the LTA project here.

To see the Learning Through Art curriculum in action, and for teaching tips and tools, check out our video series.

This curriculum resource offers:

Connections to the work of art

Short, concise summaries of the artwork, artist, and art history so you can easily connect the work to your students.

Conversation starters

Questions designed to draw students into the work of art, get them interested, and engage their higher-order thinking skills.

Assessments

Practical suggestions for including the work of art in your classroom teaching developed and tested by teachers.

Subject matter connections

Connections between the work of art and your curriculum, explaining how teaching this work can benefit your students. 

Resources

Literature to support your and your students’ exploration of the work of art.

Find a Lesson Plan for your class!

Click here to access information and resources for our virtual learning modules!

Use an evocative work of art, choose a metacognitive skill for your students to practice or search by discipline.