Arts Every Day believes families provide the most essential foundation to a solid formal education. Research has shown that the arts, when integrated into school curricula, have a profound ability to help children learn. Arts and cultural experiences promote essential skills like teamwork, leadership, imagination, problem-solving abilities, flexibility, responsibility, and tolerance. Evidence has also shown higher test scores, improved literacy skills, boosted cognitive development, and more overall engagement when students and families create and learn together.
Arts Every Day promotes programming that helps Baltimore City students achieve academic success, develop essential life and learning skills and learning with their parents and families. Be sure to visit the Baltimore Family Fun Guide and Programs Directory for upcoming calendar events and programming!
Below are additional recommended resources for parents and families to help your student gain an arts advantage.
Arts Education in Maryland Schools Alliance (PDF tool kit for parents)
The Arts Education in Maryland Schools Alliance’s Parents Tool Kit is designed to enable parents to advocate effectively for high quality arts education programs for their children.
ARTSEDGE (curriculum & lesson plans)
ARTSEDGE supports the place of arts education at the center of the curriculum through the creative and appropriate uses of technology. ARTSEDGE helps educators to teach in, through and about the arts.
ArtServe (curriculum & lesson plans)
A website of the Australian National University, this server contains 130,000 images of art and architecture, mainly from the Mediterranean Basin.
Baltimore City Historical Society (online history resources)
The goal of the Baltimore City Historical Society is to cultivate and promote the history and diversity of Baltimore City. The society works with Baltimore historians to sponsor programs on city history and with museums and universities to support their collections of historical materials.
Canada's SchoolNet Learning Resources (curriculum & lesson plans)
SchoolNet's Learning Resources includes over 5,000 quality educational materials evaluated and approved by professional educators. From power learning tools to Mathematics and Social Sciences to the arts, you can easily access all of the information you need thanks to SchoolNet's very own Metadata-driven search engine.
Coming Up Taller Awards (information)
This is a three-year initiative with the National Endowment for the Arts to showcase cultural excellence and enhance the availability of out-of-school arts and humanities programs to children. This website also links to additional arts and humanities programs for children.
Family Education Network (advocacy, curriculum & lesson plans, information)
Type in keywords "arts education" for all kinds of arts education information, including links to other arts education sites, curriculum & lesson plans, and advocacy.
The Gateway to Educational Materials (curriculum & lesson plans)
The Gateway to Educational Materials (GEM) project is a consortium effort to provide educators with quick and easy access to the substantial, but uncataloged, collections of educational materials found on various federal, state, university, non-profit, and commercial Internet sites.
Maryland Association of Boards of Education (information)
Founded in 1957, the Maryland Association of Boards of Education (MABE) is a private, non-profit organization to which all school boards in the state voluntarily belong. MABE sponsors in service activities for board members through an annual conference, orientation programs for new board members, and workshops on key topics.
National Association for Music Education (advocacy, standards, curriculum & lesson plans)
MENC's mission is to advance music education as a profession and to ensure that every child in America has access to a balanced, sequential, high-quality education that includes music as a core subject of study.
PBS TeacherSource (curriculum & lesson plans)
Arts and literature lesson plans and activities for all grade levels.
Teachers Helping Teachers (curriculum & lesson plans)
This is a free, non-profit service. It costs nothing to access the information, and no money is made from teachers who contribute. Material on this service is updated weekly during the school year. Special features of this website include additional arts education links and lesson plans.