The K-12 Visit Program is for school age groups, grades K-12. Choose from one of our thematic tours listed below or tell us what you're working on in the classroom and see if we can create something just for you.
Due to generous funding provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, we are able to subusidize the cost of a limited number of buses and admissions for Philadelphia School District and Archdiocese students. For more information about pricing, scheduling and other logistics, see our main School Group Tours page.
Ongoing Topics
Telling Tales: An Art and Language Arts Tour
(Grades K-12)
Discover narrative paintings that tell stories taken from mythology, literature, American history, the imagination, and everyday life while students do activities that reinforce important language arts skills that are part of the classroom curriculum. This tour is composed of three interactive activities that students rotate through and lasts approximately 60 minutes.
During the tour, students will:
- Uncover stories within the paintings reflecting the artists' times.
- Explore written, oral, and visual storytelling.
- Study the visual symbols that artists use to convey a story or emotion.
Click here to download a packet of pre-visit materials for classroom use.
Click here to download a description of curriculum standards in Language Arts and Visual Arts that this tour meets.
Changing Visions of American Life: Art and American History 1740-1860
(Grades 2-12)
Travel through time to view American history from 1740 to 1860. View events, culture, and daily life first hand, as represented by artists from various time periods. Some of the topics to be examined include Native Americans, colonial life, industrialization, and the Age of the Common Man. This tour is composed of three interactive activities that students rotate through and lasts approximately 60 minutes.
During the tour, students will:
- Experience sites, sounds and thoughts from the time period.
- Discover artists' responses to major events as well as changing artistic styles and techniques.
- Learn how events from yesterday influence us today.
Click here to download a packet of pre-visit materials for classroom use.
Click here to download sample artwork for two of the pre-visit activities.
Click here to download a description of curriculum standards in Social Studies and Visual Arts that this tour meets.
The Art of Peace
(Grades 3-12)
This is a unique museum visit in which students learn about creating peace in their home, school and community. Students participate in an interactive gallery tour viewing artworks in the museum galleries as well as Lost Dreams on Canvas, a portrait exhibit of children who were innocent victims of violence. Pre-visit teacher materials for The Art of Peace provide additional information and suggested activities to extend an anti-violence program into the school and classroom curriculum. This tour consists of three interactive activities and lasts approximately 90 minutes.
Seeing Green: The Art of Ecology
(Grades 2–12)
Throughout history, the environment has been a powerful source of inspiration for visual artists who are avid observers and precise recorders of the physical conditions of the natural world. This tour is designed to introduce students to the increasingly urgent dialogue about sustaining our natural environment and living lightly on the planet. This tour consists of three interactive activities and lasts approximately 60 minutes.
During the tour, students will:
- Develop an appreciation for the beauty of the natural environment as depicted in paintings in the galleries.
- Address the interrelationship of geography, natural resources, and climate and their effects on daily life.
- Consider roles they can take to care for and protect the environment.
Drawing Lessons in the Gallery
(Grades 2-12)
If you'd like to extend your visit after a regular tour, this lesson can be requested as an add-on activity. Trained artists lead students in drawing from works of art in the collection, discussing the fundamentals of drawing, design and composition while creating their own works of art and applying the informatino they learned on their tour. This lesson comes with an additional charge and lasts approximately 30 minutes.