Teachers: Prior to your tour, please discuss museum manners, especially the most important rule of all: do not touch any works of art. Even the slightest fingerprint contains destructive oil and chemicals. Perhaps the best guideline to remember is: always stay an arm’s-length from the gallery walls. We appreciate your help in making this clear to our young guests before they even come through our door. Its much better to be redundant about this early on, than to admonish a student during a tour, which can be traumatic for that student. We realize that we only have an hour with you, and that hour will have a lasting impression on each child. We want it to be a positive one!

SUGGESTED PRE-TOUR ACTIVITIES

1. Preview and explore the artwork you will see on your tour.

2. Assign looking up the definitions of the art-related vocabulary words as homework. Follow this assignment with a class discussion of the meanings of these words that will help prepare the students for their tour. Also discuss the fact that the Maier is devoted to American art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

3. Look at the slide reproductions from the set in your school library for examples of some vocabulary words.

4. Ask students research the life of an artist whose work is in the Museum’s collection and write a short report telling about the artist’s life and explaining that person’s contribution to American heritage. Have students give the report orally, as well.

5. Pair music and a visual image to stimulate students’ thoughts and feelings. Using a slide from the Maier set (in each school library), project the artwork on a screen, and play a selection of music with a similar mood. Ask students to imagine being in the painting as they listen to the music and to write about their thoughts and feelings. (Try playing 18th century dance music, like a minuet, with the Stuart or Vanderlyn portrait; music composed by Claude Debussy with an Impressionist painting by Frieseke or Hassam; music by Scott Joplin with Benton’s Preparing the Bill, or Aaron Copland’s Grand Canyon Suite with Marin’s Taos Mountain.)

6. Discuss museum etiquette.

SUGGESTED POST-TOUR ACTIVITIES

1. Have students write a journal entry or a letter to a friend explaining their ideas and feelings about a painting or drawing that communicated a message to them.

2. Ask students to pick one of the themes seen in American art within the tour. Have them choose a painting that addressed that theme and write a paragraph about it. (Themes: American visions of the natural world; city life and technology; and American people as seen through the eyes of American artists).

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