AP® Art: Grow Your Sustained Investigation with Sketchbook Prompts That Work

In strong AP® portfolios, students show practice, experimentation, and revision throughout their process. Sketchbook prompts make that process visible — and manageable — for your students.

Below is work from one of my recent AP® students. These pages show how sketchbook practice, experimentation, and revision actually look when students are encouraged to push their ideas, test materials, and make connections.

Early planning pages — notes and sketches to explore an inquiry question.

A sketch becomes more than a sketch — every test, note, and idea is connected to the big idea.

Strong portfolios show the full path from idea → sketch → experiment → final work.

If you're interested, I have my ready-to-use Sketchbook Prompts you can incorporate into any AP® Drawing or 2-D classroom available in my Teachers Pay Teachers store. These prompts encourage students to:

• Try new materials and surfaces

• Practice risk-taking and revision

• Make visible connections between materials, processes, and ideas

• Build strong written evidence for their portfolio

You can use these prompts as weekly warm-ups, mini check-ins, or independent sketchbook tasks — all while giving students clear structure that still feels open-ended and personal.

AP® is a trademark registered by the College Board, which was not involved in the production of, and does not endorse, this post or product.

Showcasing Student work with a Weekly Newsletter

Last year, I made a new commitment to create a weekly newsletter for each of my art courses to celebrate student work and to share exactly what goes on in an art classroom. These newsletters were distributed to parents and students via email and also shared on our class Facebook page. While it was a significant commitment and required a substantial amount of effort, the positive feedback from parents was truly rewarding. The regular communication not only fostered appreciation for the effort put into the newsletters but also facilitated smoother interactions when addressing more serious issues.

Within the newsletters, I provided a summary of the students' ongoing projects while advocating for the importance of visual arts education in public schools. Parents gained insight into the content of the courses and developed a better understanding of the artistic process. Additionally, I included essential upcoming dates, contact information, and visually engaging images to enhance the content.

Sizing and resizing the images to look nice in the newsletter was a huge time suck. After investing many hours in developing a template with various image sizes and formats for easy editing, I am pleased with the design and functionality. I created multiple versions of the template in different colors to cater to the preferences of educators, and I'm excited to announce that this resource is now available for purchase on Teachers Pay Teachers!