Integrating the Arts: North Carolina Museum of Art

This past Thursday, July 1st, I had the opportunity to visit and tour the newly redone North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, NC. One of my classes, Integrating Social Studies and the Arts, took a field trip to learn ways that we could use the museum as a resource in our classrooms and for field trips. To kick off the visit, we were given a presentation by the education director on two educational kits that can be reserved by teachers to use in classrooms. The first kit was the Art Detective Discovery Kit, which is available for grades 3 and 4, and allows students to use their critical eye to explore art. The second kit was Rainstorm Brainstorm, available to grades 5 through 8. The Rainstorm Brainstorm kit involves designing a pond as a "work of land art," which incorporates science and the arts into an engaging and fun activity for students.

Following our session in the auditorium where we learned about these educational kits, a docent took us to the galleries, where we toured galleries which were separated according to the artist. The first work of art that we observed was called "Eye of the Pyramid" by Libensky. This piece of artwork is simply two pieces of green glass positioned together so that it seems as if there is a pyramid carved into the center. This piece of artwork, as well as many others that we saw, are windows into the kinds of art that people of other cultures and time periods created. Viewing and exploring art allows students to think about the kinds of things that other cultures valued and thought were important to represent through their art. Cultural understanding is an integral part of any social studies curriculum.

We also observed several works of art that could be easily integrated into a math lesson. These types of pieces allow students to think mathematically.

Several galleries dedicated to individual artists revealed the types of art inherent to certain time periods as well as certain cultures. Our docent, Harriette Weinstein, was very helpful and told interesting stories about each piece of art that kept us enthralled and enabled us to understand the types of things we could teach our future students about these pieces.

We ended our trip by picking up several brochures on resources, site maps and membership applications, as well as visiting the museum gift shop. The museum gift shop features several small souveniers such as pencils, magnets, erasers and postcards as well as smaller versions of the pieces of art that we observed throughout the museum.