Overview
Children learn through play; they love being outdoors and are curious, creative, individuals. The unit “Art in D.C.: Using Rock Creek Park as Our Playground,” intended for first graders, will leverage children’s curiosity and love for play and the outdoors by exposing students to art through nature. We will learn about American landscape painters, such as Thomas Cole, Frederic Edwin Church, Albert Bierstadt, and Thomas Moran, and how they were inspired by nature.
Students will explore nature just like these artists did two centuries ago–—with their eyes opened by art itself. Students will have the opportunity to see how nature influences their own art as they learn to draw the National Park System’s oldest natural urban park, Washington, D.C.’s Rock Creek Park, en plein air. Students will also learn how artists influenced the overall National Park System. To that end, this curriculum unit will review the history of Rock Creek Park and the larger National Park System. Students will answer questions such as “What is a national park?”, “When did Rock Creek Park become a park?” and “How did the work of artists play a role in the development of national parks?” In connection with the history of Rock Creek Park, we’ll discover that national parks in general, and Rock Creek Park in particular, were established because they benefited public health.
Additionally, we’ll visit another of Washington D.C.’s great public spaces, the National Gallery of Art, to view paintings by many of the most notable American landscape artists. At the National Gallery of Art, students will explore the parallels between their direct experience of nature in Rock Creek Park and the depiction of natural beauty in landscape art. We’ll partner with Art Around the Corner—an initiative that connects the District of Columbia Public Schools with the National Gallery of Art to help expose children to art—and create works of art inspired by nature with the help of the museum’s educators. Lastly, we will connect all the above to an English Language Arts unit on plants. Specifically, we’ll deepen student knowledge of nature’s flora by combining students’ encounters of American landscape art with their direct experience of plant life in Rock Creek Park. Ultimately, while students will be using art as a vehicle to learn about nature, they will also come full circle and experience nature to learn about and create art.
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