2023 Language Artists: Weather Wonders Student Exhibition
An exhibition celebrating the collaboration between the Grand Rapids Art Museum, Grand Rapids Public Schools, The Pathfinder School (Traverse City), and Trinity Lutheran School (St. Joseph) for the 2022 – 2023 school year.
Language Artists is a year-long unit of study that integrates literacy and the visual arts by promoting academic and cultural achievement among third grade students.
Working together, students and teachers prepared themselves for a museum visit by exploring selected works of art from GRAM’s Permanent Collection focusing on weather and climate. The themes and activities for this unit were selected to support the district’s revised curriculum needs for third grade and align with the Michigan Department of Education’s state academic standards for English Language Arts, Visual Art, and Science.
While touring GRAM’s galleries, students participated in activities designed to foster skills and understanding of the concepts: description, comparing and contrasting, informative writing, opinion writing, and storytelling. Returning to the classroom, students built upon the knowledge they learned at GRAM and created a personal work of art about weather. Students would later use these works of art as inspiration for their informative writing and opinion writing assignments for this unit of study.
THANK YOU TO OUR LANGUAGE ARTIST SPONSORS
Wege Foundation
PNC Bank
Michigan Arts and Culture Council
National Endowment for the Arts
James and Mary Nelson
Peter C. & Emajean Cook Foundation
Bill and Marilyn Crawford
The Sebastian Foundation Fund of Grand Rapids Community Foundation
Wolverine Worldwide
Keller Foundation
Gregory and Rajene Betz
DTE Energy Foundation
The Samuel L. Westerman Foundation
Additional funding is provided by contributions from Art for Life donors.