School-Museum Partnerships

Art Class Onsite at The Aldrich (Preschool to Grade 5)
This program, designed as a complement to your school's curriculum, provides young children with the opportunity to make The Aldrich Museum their art class and studio. Classes of up to 15 children visit the Museum once a month during the school year (six sessions or more) to explore the works in our galleries, and are encouraged to make connections between what they see and experience here and their everyday lives, with stories and hands-on activities utilizing a wide variety of materials. Teachers and parent chaperones attend the hour-long sessions along with the children. A Museum educator leads each session and all materials are provided.

Aldrich Ambassadors (Grades 3 - 4)
Aldrich Ambassadors engages a group of eight students from third or fourth grade to act as scouts at the Museum and then report their findings back to their classmates. The goal of the program is to teach basic principles about The Aldrich Museum-such as what "contemporary" means, how a museum operates, where the art comes from-while allowing your students to develop their observation skills. Each time an Ambassador reports to his/her classmates, the students create drawings or write letters to illustrate the information presented to them. Finally, the entire class visits the Museum on a trip led by the Ambassadors, and works together to create a comprehensive artwork defining a museum.

Fees: $4 per student attending class visit. Scholarships are available. Contact the education department at 203.438.4519. for more information and an application. Prices for hands-on activity vary with activity.

Mini-Partnerships (Grades 3 - 12)
Many of our exhibitions lend themselves to particular partnerships with fields outside of art, such as physics, government, history, and biology. With this in mind, the education department offers mini-partnerships with teachers of science, history, humanities, and current events. These partnerships aim to customize consecutive student visits to the Museum to the classroom curriculum by in-depth exploration of relevant exhibitions. The structure of these partnerships is tailored to the goals determined by the classroom teacher and Museum educator.

Fees: $3 per student for a two-visit partnership

ART/WRITE (Grades 3 to 12)
ART/WRITE is a multi-visit program in which a classroom teacher and a Museum educator collaborate during two Museum visits to use works of art in the Museum to enhance the original written work of students. Students complete two writing sessions at the Museum during the school day, partnered with three in-class or homework periods. After these five sessions are complete, students have a polished piece of writing, the form of which is determined by their classroom teacher. These student pieces will be published in an inter-school journail in the spring and distributed to participants and Aldrich artists.