Buildings and bowls from other times and places

This lesson asks you to become aware of works of art from different communities, times and places, such as famous buildings and decorated objects. The museum offers one building and one bowl; your class brings the buildings, comics and crafts it knows from pictures and from life. ¹

Look at a work of art and ask where it comes from and roughly when it was made. Ask what clues in the picture tell you.

Name what you see in the work. Ask who might have lived with it or used it, and what they might have liked about it.

Picture a very big building beside a river. The Taj Mahal is a mausoleum in Agra, built by Shah Jahan for his wife Mumtaz Mahal ². Its walls are brick, covered with white marble that has stones set into it ³. It stands at the edge of its garden, above the Yamuna river ⁴. The museum also holds a turquoise bowl from Iran that shows a lute player and his companion ⁵.

Shah Jahan had the Taj Mahal built for his wife. If you made something big for a person you love, what would you make it from, and why?

• Taj Mahal: who had it built, and what its walls are made of.
• Turquoise Bowl with Lute Player: a bowl from Iran with a lute player and his companion on it.

Read the card on the Taj Mahal and the card on the Turquoise Bowl with Lute Player. Draw one of them, then tell a partner where it comes from and one thing you noticed.