School Tours

Making Friends
Grades: PreK-2

Students will look closely at works of art to identify details about characters who may become friends, places where they might spend time with friends, and activities they can do together with friends. Students will consider how the values of friendship are expressed through art.

Awakening the Senses
Grades: PreK-2

This tour prioritizes sensory learning. Through activities that incorporate movement, sketching, writing, and conversation, students will focus on the senses of sound, sight, touch, taste, and smell as the primary pathways to make connections to art.

Art & Storytelling
Grades: K-3

Every work of art tells a story. Through close looking at artwork, students will consider setting, character(s), and mood. Then they will take a deep dive into the storytelling possibilities based on selected works of art. Through sketching, performance, or writing, students will use their imaginations to create stories based on their own life experiences and/or in a response to the artwork.

Color, Line & Shape
Grades: K-8

This tour will concentrate on color, line, and shape, and explore how these elements of art create compositional structure. Focusing on representational art, abstract art, and art that challenges categorization, the tour will foster critical thinking and creative expression. Discussions will use the museum’s collection to explore key visual art terms and concepts. Students will learn that there is no right way, no wrong way, and no limits to making art.

Nature in Art
Grades: 3-6

Students will engage with the beauty of artworks inspired by the natural world. Using close looking strategies, they will identify elements of art and draw conclusions about how nature motivates and influences artists. Students will think critically about the impact humans have on the natural world as they use art to express their own relationship with the environment.

Exploring Places: Real, Imagined, Close By, Far Away
Grades: 3-7

Students will use art to critically engage with artistic representations of place. They will work together to explore artwork that depicts “real” or identifiable places and artwork that inspires the imagination to create places of personal meaning. This tour can be customized to include DC-born and -based artists, enabling local students to connect with artwork that has a significant relationship to their hometown.

Making Meaning: Why Museums Matter
Grades: 6-12

What goes on behind the scenes of a museum? How do we make the museum experience meaningful? On this tour, students will learn how collections are created, preserved, and interpreted, and how we can make them relevant to visitors. They will consider how museums flourish as institutions for lifelong learning by harnessing the talents of a diverse group of individuals with a broad range of skills. Students will be encouraged to think about how their own talents and interests may apply to such an environment.

Taking a Stand, Making a Change
Grades: 7-12

Art is inseparably connected to identity. Whether you are the artist or the art admirer, art illuminates who we are as human beings and influences how we relate to each other and the world around us. In this tour, students will explore the relationship of identity to artistic expression by analyzing the ways in which artists use the elements of art (color, line, shape, form, and texture) to convey their expressions of identity. Students will gain a deeper understanding on the interconnectedness of identity and artistic expression to consider how art can be a powerful platform for diverse thoughts in advocacy and activism and in the sharing of historical events and personal narratives.

Shifting Perspectives & Seeing Differently
Grades: 9-12

Each student experiences the world from their own unique perspective. In this tour, students will discover the importance of seeing the world through different lenses. They will analyze how different individuals can reach unique conclusions, even when accessing the same visual information. They will develop new ways to engage with art through their own personal experiences and through listening to varied perspectives in group discussions.

Write About It
Grades: 9-12

Looking at visual art sparks imagination and creativity. Write About It harnesses that spark and uses it as a springboard into creative writing. After close looking at artwork, students will express personal voices, consider different points of view, and explore deeper meaning through a variety of writing prompts and activities. Published text (from song lyrics to poetry, dramatic dialogues to personal memoir) will be explored as examples of the power of the written word.