Suffolk Public Schools Secondary Visual Art provides students an opportunity to learn and grow in self-expression, exploring various styles of visual arts as appropriate to their grade. Students develop lifelong skills of collaboration and teamwork, creativity and imagination, critical thinking, and communication and problem-solving, necessary within the framework of 21^st Century Skills.

Suffolk Public Schools’ Fine and Performing Arts Curriculums for secondary visual arts courses inherently teach the overarching concepts within its benchmarks.  Within each area, the Virginia Standards of Learning for Fine Arts addresses 21st Century Learning Skills but also:

• Social-emotional learning 

• Fine motor skills

• Critical Thinking Skills

• Behavioral interventions through creative coping mechanisms

• Collaboration

• Effective Communication

• Differentiated and Modified Instruction and Communication

• Self-Expression

Within the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), a well-rounded education includes fine and performing arts to prepare the whole child as they matriculate through school.  Students will engage in cultural literacy in order to be a more thoughtful and contributing member of  their community.  Through the course of study, students will learn skills that further develop them for the 21st Century Workforce. Students will utilize their study of their visual arts in their perception of the world and integration in society as community members.  Students will evaluate artistic works objectively, but also to develop personal opinions (subjectively).  Students will learn to use the arts for expression of emotion and creativity and how that works in any field of study, through generalized cultural literacy.

Courses Include:

• Visual Arts 6 (nine weeks)
  
  
• Visual Arts 7 (semester)
  
  
• Visual Arts 8 (semester and year round)
  
  
• HS Art I
  
  
• HS Art II
  
  
• Drawing
  
  
• Painting
   
• Photography
  
  
• Art History