In honor of Youth Art Month, let’s explore a variety of eBooks for art teachers to help engage and excite art students. The arts can be a powerful tool to motivate reluctant readers, helping them engage with text and broaden their reading skills. Art teachers rely on text; fiction, fantasy, and nonfiction, to help inform and inspire students. Research and inquiry are an integral part of visual art education.
“The good news is that literacy practice in the art room doesn’t have to be some big fancy initiative involving laborious training. We can use what we are already doing with our students and add a literacy twist.” (5 Ways to Bring Literacy into the Art Classroom.)
To easily find and search for supplemental materials to support the art room go to Educator Tools. Search by subject, grade level, and content area to find eBooks, videos, lesson plans, best practices, flyers, tip sheets, and more.
The following are a few ways that art teachers can use INFOhio resources to support what they are already doing in the art room. INFOhio has a plethora of eBooks that can be thoughtfully incorporated into the art classroom.
Offering graphic novels to reluctant readers can help encourage and improve reading and visual literacy skills. INFOhio has dozens of graphic novels for PreK-12 students on a variety of subjects. Art teachers can use graphic novels as inspiration for students, as examples of storyboarding and illustration techniques, and examples of elements and principles of design.
Thunder Rolling Down The Mountain: The Story Of Chief Joseph And The Nez Perce
Samurai : Japan's Noble Servant-Warriors
Amelia Earhart Flies Across The Atlantic
Encourage independent, self-directed learning with eBooks that provide step-by-step instructions. Art teachers can use these eBooks at stations and for early finishers. Reading and understanding images is important for our image-based world. Understanding both reading and visual literacy and how they impact each other is a necessary skill for students to develop. "When we can help students grow their writing, reading, and critical thinking skills, it can support deeper artmaking and appreciation." (6 Ways to Use Books in the Art Classroom to Support ELA and Visual Literacy)
Fun With Painting And Sculpture
Fun With Cultural Crafts And Performing Arts
Art history textbooks can be costly, but INFOhio offers eBooks that make learning more accessible in the art room. With unlimited, simultaneous access, you and your students can explore art history anytime, hassle-free.
A Brief Illustrated History Of Art
Art teachers know that research and curiosity are a big part of art making. Search from a variety of topics that can pique the interest of students and motivate them to read, research, and dig deeper into content. Use resources from INFOhio to inform your lesson planning and supplement your instruction.
Dogs In Art, Myth, And Legend
10 Fascinating Facts About Dinosaurs
Use text to inspire art making. Finding creative poems and stories will enhance and excite students to make artwork based on text. Poems and short stories are a wonderful way to encourage more storytelling, reading, creativity, and visual literacy in your classroom showing how all of these things are connected and intertwined.
Research and inquiry into the world of objects can be exciting for students. Create hands-on experiences linked with quality text to strengthen students’ ability to connect visual images and objects with written information.
Research Primary Source Artifacts: Tools, Clothing, Coins, And More!
Thomas Jefferson's Desk: What An Artifact Can Tell Us About The Declaration Of Independence
Reading aloud or playing an audio book while students work helps to keep them focused and reinforces your unit of study. Use these stories to set the tone for a new project or concept.
Adonde Te Lleva El Arte? (Spanish)
Choice boards are a helpful tool for instruction, engaging students with options for how to learn new content. INFOhio visual choice boards include eBooks and videos that provide differentiation for students of all ages. You can find all the curated choice boards by doing a keyword search in Educator Tools for “choice boards.” The results yield more than 100 choice boards on science, social studies, art, creativity, and literature topics.
Photographs That Changed History
Enjoy exploring and using these resources in your art room and share what you’ve found with other educators. If you have questions visit support.infohio.org. We are here to help!
Emily Fitch is a Professional Instructional Specialist with INFOhio. She has 13 years of teaching experience, grades 4-12, visual arts and career tech. She also has two years of experience as the Director of Education for a non-profit art center. She has a Bachelor of Science in Art Education and a Master of Education in Curriculum and Instruction. Her primary focus on the instructional team centers around developing the Create-Lead-Empower Ohio toolkit and providing support to the education community on student empowerment through student-driven tech support, self-directed learning, service learning, and career exploration in alignment to Ohio's Strategic Plan for Education.
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