Middle School Visual Arts Grade 6-8th

The Arts Standards are designed to be compacted to serve a brief course of instruction, or they may be expanded for delivery to a semester or longer. While the Visual Arts can significantly contribute to a child’s continuing cognitive and emotional growth, not all students take art at the middle school level. The art teacher may have students for one term or multiple terms. Middle school art teachers must adapt to a wide range of abilities in a single classroom. To meet a wide range of students' needs, art should be taught by a certified visual arts specialist with training in curriculum and pedagogy. Art is an important means of self-expression, self-reflection, and the creation of personal identity. The Georgia Performance Standards for Visual Art builds opportunities for students to develop in affective, academic, and social ways through the explorations of visual media in their own art-making and increasingly rigorous inquiry into art history, contemporary art-making, and cultural contexts. The standards guide the development of the students’ technical skills and higher-order thinking. Aesthetic understanding, imagination, creativity, problem-solving, artistic skills and knowledge, historical and cultural context, critical analysis, and connections to other disciplines are important aspects of these standards. Form and content cannot be separated. How something is said or done shapes the content of the experience. Personal success stems from the care invested in one’s own work and the ability to work cooperatively with others in a dynamic studio setting.

High School Visual Arts Grade 9 - 12

Building on the educational outcomes of Visual Arts in elementary and middle school education, high school art prepares students for personal development in the arts, constructing a body of work that may be instrumental in admission to higher education and professional development. Aesthetic understanding, imagination, creativity, problem-solving, artistic skills and knowledge, historical and cultural context, critical analysis, and connections to other disciplines are important aspects of these standards. Form and content cannot be separated. How something is said or done shapes the content of the experience. Personal success stems from the care invested in one’s own work and the ability to work cooperatively with others in a dynamic studio setting.The Georgia Performance Standards for Visual Arts builds opportunities for students to grow in affective, academic, and social ways through visual media explorations in their own art-making. Following a comprehensive introduction to the Visual Arts, students demonstrate rigorous inquiry into specific study disciplines. The standards guide the development of the students’ technical skills and higher-order thinking. This sequence, a developmentally appropriate set of high school standards, has been designed to develop aesthetic understanding, creative thinking, artistic skills and knowledge, historical and cultural context, critical analysis, and connections to other disciplines.