Do you crave something deeper in your art classroom? Something more meaningful?
On our mission to transform our students’ lives for the better, teachers run into huge challenges…
- Students don’t seem to care. Blank stares, no raised hands, late work. Then, at the end of the year, they throw away their artworks on their way out the door.
- You feel like you’re spinning all the plates you can, but something is still missing. You want your students to love art and connect with art. You want to change their lives with art. But you don’t know where to start.
- You want your art class to be more than just crafts. You want to infuse your lessons with meaning and the deep social-emotional learning that you know your students need. But how?
- You became a teacher because you wanted to do work that matters, but now you’re tired, burnt out, and overwhelmed. You want to love teaching and be excited to go to school each day, but that feels impossible.
Energize, Engage, and Inspire your Students with the Power of Art Connection
- CONNECT with your students through artworks that reflect their diverse lives and broaden their understanding of the world
- TEACH thoughtful and inspiring lessons that get them engaged and KEEP them engaged
- DEVELOP authentic and meaningful art projects that are more than copycat crafts
- MOTIVATE the students who come into your classroom thinking that art doesn’t matter or that art is not for them
- GAIN confidence in your teaching and your own connection to artists and artworks so that you can deliver “Teacher of the Year” worthy lessons every day
Excite Your Students
Feel like you can only reach a handful of students? Engage all your students with a hands-on, minds-on approach WITHOUT lecture or copycat crafts.
Love Teaching
Tired of feeling burned out and unappreciated? Connect with your students and experience more teaching highs with lessons that will have your students lighting up and making personal connections.
Connect with Diverse Art
Renew your own love of art while you teach classroom-tested lessons based on artworks from across time and cultures.
Customize Your Curriculum & Save Time
Banish burnout and get off the non-stop planning treadmill with editable, classroom-ready resources. You’ll get your free time back with a vault of lessons, units, and activities that you can customize to meet your students’ needs and interests (that your admins will love).How Liz took advantage of Curated Connections to inspire students and save time
As a middle and high school art teacher, Liz struggled to create lessons that focused on art connection. There weren’t enough hours in the day for everything she wanted to do because of everything she had to do.
With Curated Connections, she doesn’t have to spend hours researching artists and artworks and trying to fit them into her plans. Now, she has everything she needs at her fingertips!
Superpower your teaching with flexible SPARKworks lessons
Our signature SPARKworks lessons will change the way you teach. Every SPARKworks lesson is built around an artwork. We choose art from across time and cultures, so you can fill your classroom with diverse perspectives and voices. Then, we give you everything you need to teach a complete lesson.
The best part? You choose how you use them!
- Want a complete lesson that’s ready to teach?
Done. - Ready to have meaningful classroom art discussions around a certain theme or art period?
Your questions are ready and your artworks are filterable. - Need project ideas that are inspired by artworks but flexible enough to fit your classroom supplies and needs?
You got it! - Wish you didn’t have to spend so much time researching and making presentations and worksheets?
It’s all done for you. - Need a quick video that discusses an individual artwork?
Each new SPARKworks lesson includes a video!
With SPARKworks, you choose the artwork that will excite and interest your students. Curate your curriculum and customize the lessons to fit your needs and how you like to teach.
SPARKworks lessons are at the heart of what we do. These are quality resources that you can use year after year, but with the emphasis on student connection and interaction, the lesson will never be the same twice!
Your students will bring their knowledge and experience to every discussion, activity, and project. You get to make meaningful connections with your students while they will truly, deeply connect with art in a way that will stay with them for a lifetime.
You can save your favorite lessons, leave comments for other art teachers, and more!
175+ SPARKworks Lessons: Our signature, ready-to go lessons that include everything you need to incorporate a new artwork into your classroom each week, every week. New lessons are released each month! Each one includes:
Lesson Plan with discussion questions, talking points, learning styles, multiple activities, and art projects
PowerPoint with the artwork, discussion questions, artist/cultural information, and location where the art was created and where it currently resides
Worksheets
NEW! New SPARKworks lessons now include separate lesson plans for elementary and middle/high school! Plus, worksheets are now available in Google as well as PDF and Word formats.
Flexibility, Confidence, Engagement: What You Get as a Member of Curated Connections
Curated Connections is a membership program committed to providing inspiring connections to art that increase student engagement, empower teachers, and provide quality and innovative teaching resources while saving the time, energy, and brainpower of art teachers across the globe.
What’s Included
175+ SPARKworks Lessons:
Our signature, ready-to go lessons that include everything you need to incorporate artworks into your classroom. They’re flexible and detailed, so you can use them in the way that works best for you—a weekly lesson, a fresh way to teach artistic concepts, an introduction to new art projects, as classroom art discussions, et cetera!
World Mosaic Now Included - Full Elementary K-5 Curriculum!
Take your students on a journey around the world! In this K-5 art curriculum, complete with 42 full units (7 units per grade), students will travel around the globe and discover artworks from North America, South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Middle East! Along the way, they’ll build cross-curricular connections and gain valuable social-emotional skills. Each unit includes an anchor artwork with discussions and activities as well as a related art project.
Perspectives Now Included - Art 1 Full-Year Curriculum!
Engage students with cross-curricular connections and social-emotional life skills through the power of art. This full year curriculum for secondary students is built around robust themes with diverse artworks to draw students in, unique activities to spark deep learning, and adaptable projects to grow their creativity and artistic skills. Perspectives includes 10 powerful thematic units, including Identity, Community, the Power of Voice, and more. Each unit includes two anchor artworks with discussions questions and talking points, along with multiple activities and a theme-based art project.
The Art Appreciation Master Class:
A crash course in everything you need to develop the confidence and skill to curate powerful art connections with your students.
BONUS - 30+ Hours of Professional Development Courses and Webinars:
Learn how to WOW your students (and admins!) with innovative teaching strategies and discussion techniques.
Teachers like you are motivating students and loving these exciting lessons
About Cindy Ingram, Art Class Curator
Hi! I’m Cindy Ingram, the creator of Art Class Curator and Curated Connections.
I have the awkward habit of crying in front of artworks, and I want the rest of the world to do it too. This noble quest has culminated in the creation of Art Class Curator, where I share how to creatively teach art appreciation and art history in a way that will spark a lifelong personal connection to art.
I have more than twenty years of experience in schools, museums, and non-profit organizations. I have an MA in Art Education and a BA in Art History. In addition to working in museums and teacher professional development, I have had the privilege of teaching art in the classroom to all grades–elementary to college.
I’ve been there, from the sleepless nights scrolling through the internet to binge-watching art history videos to prepare for my next class. I’ve done the work—crafted the lessons, tested them with students, and tweaked the plans to perfection—all so you don’t have to.
To date, I have not yet made any of my students cry (knowingly), but there’s still time.
Frequently Asked Questions
Curated Connections contains SPARKWorks lessons for over 175 artwork lessons for all grade levels. The lessons are filterable by grade level and most of the artworks contain both an elementary and a middle/high version of the lesson! Teachers of all grades will find artworks and activities perfect for their students.
Curated Connections also includes a full K-5 curriculum and a secondary Art I curriculum.
The membership contains over 175 SPARKworks lessons. These are engaging learning experiences centered around a work of art that focus on student connection through classroom discussions, interactive art connection activities, engaging videos, AND authentic art projects that are customizable to what you’re teaching and the supplies you have on hand.
Our mission is to help make art a meaningful part of every student’s life. Our resources are engaging and fun, filled with social-emotional learning, cross-curricular connections, deep conversations, and thoughtful play. We don’t believe in dry lectures, boring art history facts, or cookie-cutter crafts.
With Curated Connections, your students will truly connect with works of art and make art that is meaningful to them.
You won’t just focus on the dead white guys in your art class this year. Curated Connections includes artworks by artists from across time and culture. Sure, we cover some of the classics. But art is so much more, and Curated Connections reflects that.
To give you an idea of the diversity of artworks in the membership, you’ll get lessons on 48+ artworks made by women artists and 50+ contemporary artworks. From art by indigenous people to African art to contemporary Chinese digital art, you will find an amazing assortment of captivating and complex artworks to explore with your students.
When we choose art for the membership, we use the 4 Cs.
- Is the artwork captivating–does it immediately draw you in and make you want to learn more?
- Is the artwork communicative–does it have a message, meaning, or narrative that is accessible to students?
- Is it complex–does it allow for multiple interpretations?
- Is it connected–can students find personal connections through their interests, cultures, and more?
Choosing the right art for the right lesson is a hard and time-consuming task, but Curated Connections makes it easy with indexing, filtering, and bookmarking capabilities built in!
You don’t need to have all the answers! Our methods are focused on student interaction and art connection. Artworks become a part of a student’s life when they find meaning in them, not when they learn a bunch of dates and dry facts. Plus, we’ve done the research for you. You’ll have all the talking points you need to feel prepared and confident!
With our Art Appreciation Master Class, you’ll learn all the skills you need to facilitate powerful art connections for your students—from in-depth classroom discussions, to engaging activities, and thoughtful art projects, and beyond!
Our resources are made to be flexible and customizable. Whether you want a full curriculum that’s classroom-tested and ready to go or you’re looking to add more artwork connections to your already awesome lessons, Curated Connections is right for you.
SPARKworks lessons are focused on student interaction and connection. In addition to all the activities, discussion questions, etc, each one includes project ideas for art-making, but they are flexible enough to be used with almost any media. Teaching a class that’s all photography or ceramics? Every SPARKworks lesson you teach can include a project in that medium (even if the lesson artwork is in a different medium).
You have the choice to give your students firm directions or allow them the freedom of choice, so the Library works whether you prefer TAB or have a more traditional setup.
However you teach, Curated Connections will work for you.
We know the value of a teacher’s dollar. We’ve all spent money on disappointing downloads that we never used or had to edit so much we might as well have made our own.
Curated Connections is different.
Ongoing support. In-depth, on-demand training. Featured lessons every month.
The membership gives you all that for little less than a dollar a day.
Your time is worth it. Your students are worth it.
You are worth it, because you deserve to change lives without sacrificing yours.
There are two membership payment options–monthly or yearly. Both are available as yearly or monthly memberships. If you buy yearly, you get an extra discount!
Your’ll get access to the entire Curated Connections for $39/mo or $399/year, which includes:
- Filterable and indexed collection of 175+ SPARKworks lessons
- Ability to comment and share your experiences with other curator teachers like you
- The Art Appreciation Master Class + Creating Curated Connections, and more Online PD Videos and Courses
- Hundreds of Art Appreciation and Criticism Worksheets and Activities
- BONUS: 30+ Hours of Professional Development Courses and Webinars
- BONUS: Ancient Art Around the World, Online Course (Value $169)
You can cancel at any time, and you will have access to the materials up until your next billing date.
Curated Connections has content for all grade levels – K-college
There’s no need! It’s available to you right from the start.
Yes! Most of the files are provided in editable formats. Some of the worksheets, because of the design features, are only available as PDF. You will need Microsoft Office to open the documents as most of the downloads are in Word and PowerPoint formats. We’ve used fonts that are available on both Mac and PC, so everything will be formatted correctly and ready to use when you need it.
Documents are also provided in PDF format to make for quick and easy printing.
Uses Google Classroom? SPARKworks documents are also available in Google for easy sharing with your students.
Please note, memberships are licensed per teacher. Due to copyright law, resources cannot be shared with teachers who are not members of Curated Connections.
If you are not satisfied with your membership, we are happy to refund the full amount of your purchase within the first 30 days, no questions asked. Simply contact us using the form at this link or reply to any of our emails.
Absolutely! Simply fill out the Purchase Order Form to get started.
WHAT OTHER TEACHERS ARE SAYING...
My Promise to You
If this sounds like a good fit for you, and you’re ready to make the investment in yourself and your students, I promise you that The Curated Connections Library will create the art connections you’ve been longing for in your classroom.
In fact, I guarantee it!
Download the resources, try out the lessons, watch the trainings. See all that we have in store for you in Curated Connections. If you are still not completely blown away with the hundreds of art lessons, trainings, and helpful classroom downloads, we are happy to refund the full amount of your purchase within the first 30 days of your membership, no questions asked.