Celebrate National Arts & Humanities Month every day of October. Learner has a resource to inspire students to examine, find, and create art for each theme. Don’t forget to share pictures on Instagram and tag them #ShowYourArt2018. Look to the Americans for the Arts website for additional resources and ideas for your students and classrooms.

There are, of course, multiple ways to interpret a theme. The suggestions below will span all of the major subject areas and are meant to inspire various forms of art as a representation of the theme or possible solution to a problem. The options are limitless: kinetic statues, photographs, drawings, dances, songs, sculptures, poems, spoken word, and more.

1. Blue – Obviously, water comes to mind, but what about energy? In Essential Lens: Analyzing Photographs Across the Curriculum, view a “Surfer on blue ocean wave in the tube getting barreled” as part of the unit on “Energy: Captures, Storage, and Transformation.”
2. Transportation – Wildlife species are often subject to habitat fragmentation when humans build roads for their own transportation. Read about how habitat fragmentation can facilitate biodiversity decline in The Habitable Planet and then dream up creative ways to create corridors for wildlife to safely “cross the road.”
3. The word “art” – Explore the meaning of “art” in The Arts in Every Classroom, “What is Art?“
4. Rural art – Successful collaborations between classroom teachers and artists in residence enrich the curriculum of a rural school in Idalia, Colorado in program 10 of The Arts in Every Classroom Library, K-5. A visiting actor brings story–telling and vocabulary to life for kindergarten and fourth–grade students and their teachers, while a musician engages first– and third–grade students in writing songs that relate to subjects they are studying.
5. Education – In the “Change and Resistance” unit of Essential Lens, examine photographs of school integration and demands for equal education.
6. Animals – Ecosystems are a balancing act and the removal of one species could affect many others. After playing the Ecology Lab interactive in The Habitable Planet, consider creating a game, video game, or piece of art to explore this topic further.
7. Theatre – In Connecting with the Arts: A Teaching Practices Library, 6-8, a language arts teacher draws on puppetry techniques and help from her school’s theatre teacher to engage her sixth-graders in exploring Greek myths.
8. Ceramics – Watch a language arts teacher and a visual art teacher ask eighth-graders to demonstrate their understanding of a novel’s characters by creating unusual ceramic place settings in Connecting with the Arts, “Revealing Character.”
9. Arts & religion – Learn about the role of various forms of art in ceremonial practices around the world in Art Through Time, “Ceremony and Society.”
10. Typography – Artist Ed Ruscha was fascinated with cartoons like Dick Tracy when he was growing up. His art is inspired by how the words look on the page as well as what they mean. Listen to an expert perspective and view one of his paintings in Art Through Time. Then have students create their own fonts.
11. Rainbows – As polarized light passes through corn syrup, a rainbow forms, turning physics principles into art forms. See Physics for the 21st Century, unit 9, “Biophysics.”
12. My community – K-2 students help improve their community by designing and planning a school remodeling project and creating posters to recruit classmates for help in Social Studies in Action, “Caring for the Community.”
13. Murals – Learn what makes a mural relevant to its audience in Art Through Time.
14. Found art – Symmetry is one of the most basic forms are art and exists throughout the natural world. Examine symmetrical qualities of butterflies, sea stars, and flowers in “The Beauty of Symmetry” from Mathematics Illuminated, before looking for art that exists naturally in your own environment.
15. Music – Exploring the World of Music shows how elements such as melody, rhythm, and texture create an infinite variety of sounds and serve as expressions of culture.
16. Arts & tourism – Robin Neuman’s 8th graders research French architecture and practice how to give and follow directions by building a French city in their classroom. Watch the lesson in Teaching Foreign Languages Library.
17. Art for all! – American Passages, unit 16, “Search for Identity,” explores the search for identity by three American writers: Maxine Hong Kingston, Sandra Cisneros, and Leslie Feinberg. Students can use these writers as inspiration for writing their own prose.
18. Black & white – In American Cinema, program 7, “Film Noir,” learn about the genre’s themes and the use of lighting to give the films a particular look.
19. Veterans – Psychiatrist Daniel Shay connects the experiences of American soldiers returning from war to the return of Odysseus to Ithaca following the Trojan War in Invitation to World Literature, program 3, “The Odyssey.”
20. Love in art – Learn about the qualities of films in the romantic comedy genre in program 5 of American Cinema.
21. Urban art – View the reciprocal relationship between urban planners and architects and the artists that depict urban landscapes in unit 11, “The Urban Experience,” in Art Through Time.
22. Dance – In The Art of Teaching the Arts, workshop 4, watch as dance teachers engage students in critical analysis of a painting, as a way to encourage expression with words as well as movement.
23. Spoken word – In session 9, “Critical Pedagogy: Abiodun Oyewole and Lawson Fusao Inada,” of The Expanding Canon: Teaching Multicultural Literature, learn how to use spoken word performance to help students publish their work and build a variety of language arts skills.
24. Art around the world – Art Through Time takes a thematic approach to exploring art created around the world and in different eras.
25. Artists we love – American artist Kehinde Wiley reinterprets old masters with new images that replace the central figures in these pictures with vivid portraits of young, often disenfranchised African American men who wear their own street clothes. Learn about his work in Art Through Time, “Portraits.”
26. Advocacy – How can visual media be used for advocacy? Essential Lens, “Forced Displacement,” examines how media is used to portray the experiences and perspectives of displaced people.
27. Modern art – American artist Sandy Skoglund creates elaborate sets and photographs them, revealing colorful fantasy images. Learn about her work in Art Through Time, “Dreams and Visions.”
28. Red – Watch artists, experts, and lovers of books discuss the novel My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk in Invitation to World Literature. Students can consider how to use color in their own stories.
29. Creativity at work – Baking beautiful cakes is art in its most delicious form. Learn about the chemistry of baking from a professional baker in Chemistry: Challenges and Solutions, “Acids and Bases – Voyage of the Protons” and then challenge students to bake a visual (and edible) representation of the concepts.
30. Art on the page – Students learn about the relationship between form and content of poetry in Reading & Writing in the Disciplines, “Reading, Writing, and Responding to Poetry.” Exercises focus on identity and names.
31. Artist’s choice – I’m sure you know the phrase “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” but where does the “sense” of beauty come from? What constants are there, and what does algebra or geometry have to do with it? Watch “The Beauty of Symmetry” in Mathematics Illuminated.