Art Works for Kids Lesson Tool
Arts Integrated Lessons for your K-6 Classroom
Education is much more than just academic achievement. The classroom needs to be a place where students can learn about themselves as well as the world around them. Integrating the arts into the core curriculum is a proven strategy for helping to address all the needs of students. In elementary schools, arts-integrated learning has been shown to improve students’ social, emotional, core academic, and arts learning.May 11, 2020
Kindergarten through third grade students will dance the 8 characteristics of living things. NOTE: This lesson plan was written specifically for 3rd grade but you can vary it for grades K-2 since they also learn about living things.
May 7, 2020
Sixth grade students will dance about the properties of light. They will learn how light travels, what happens when light hits an object, what objects allow light to go through, what makes up the light spectrum, the parts of a light wave, color reflection and bioluminescent animals.
May 7, 2020
This lesson teaches students to look at the physical characteristics of different landforms and processes and to block them into a landscape drawing. It also teaches them how to create shadows and achieve different values through mixing oil pastel.
May 7, 2020
Students learn about the culture and traditions of Japan, learning a Japanese fishing folk dance, and writing and dancing their own “Big Fish Tales” using the format of tall tale.
May 6, 2020
Students will discover ways in which emotional, mental and physical health can be promoted and sustained. Students will focus specifically on how these modes of health take place within the space of the school. Listing activities or verbs that promote these three forms of health, students act out and draw poses associated with these verbs. In groups, students choose one of the three forms of health. Then they choose a school activity or program that promotes that form of health, recognizing where within the school that activity occurs. Students then create a life size silhouette of a pose that represents […]
May 6, 2020
Students will read In the Tall, Tall Grass by Denise Fleming with the music teacher, learn spoken chants, add instrumentation to those chants, and add Orff accompaniment to the chants.
April 22, 2020
Students will explore how people in the world have fought injustice through movement.
April 22, 2020
Parents and offspring share similar characteristics and behaviors. Can your class guess which two actors are portraying the same species, and which actor is the impostor? Then, add another twist by placing the organisms in a different environment. Can a frog survive in the arctic? Why not? Can an apple tree grow in the ocean? Why not? What features make each organism suitable to its environment?
April 21, 2020
Second grade students will travel to all seven continents and discover some of the most significant sights and landmarks for each. They will do this after hearing the beginning of the story of How I Learned Geography by Uri Shulevitz. Note that this lesson needs to be split into sections and can be spread out over a period of time.
April 20, 2020
Fifth grade students will dance about heredity, specifically organisms and their traits; parents and their offspring; and how organisms survive their environments. They will conclude by creating nonexistent animals by deciding what traits an newly invented animal would need to survive in a particular environment.
March 21, 2020
Second and/or third grade students will dance about gravity, mass verses weight and falling objects. They will conclude by choreographing a dance that defies gravity.
March 20, 2020
In this lesson, students will learn elements of science, technology, engineering, art, and math by composing songs on the iPads. The 12-Bar blues will serve as the format for compositions and GarageBand will be the app of choice. As an extension, students may create tableaux and apply their composition to an iMovie.
March 4, 2020
Second grade students will split into two groups. One group will create a habitat (desert, tide pool, jungle, savanna, forest and pond) with their bodies and props, while the other group will create the animals to move in, around and through the habitat.
March 3, 2020
Students will create a gray scale painting of a famous Great American, they will learn and use start up skills, like tracing to start, and blocking in.
February 25, 2020
Music/movement session that asks students to act out (define) common verbs and then practice playing different verbs (walking, running, etc.) on simple percussion instruments.
February 21, 2020
The song, We’re Going to the Zoo, serves as a vehicle for learning animals and their movements. In addition, it can be used to learn the difference between nouns and verbs.
February 19, 2020
Mosaics are an art form in which murals are made using tiny tiles or pieces of paper cut in geometric shapes to create a picture. Mosaics are Persian in origin and are seen today all over the world. It is an ADDITIVE MEDIUM – one piece follows another – and has been used at least since the fourth millennium BC to decorate and express the needs and feelings of people, both publicly and domestically.
February 19, 2020
Third grade students will dance the following basic geometric terms: line, point, line segment, ray, parallel lines, intersection, vertex and angle. They will also dance about perimeters, areas, polygons and quadrilaterals.
February 18, 2020
Fourth grade students will learn about fractions through dance improvisations and choreographic assignments.
February 18, 2020
Fossils are amazing discoveries. Many of the things we know about the past are a result of fossils. Think about the dinosaurs. We have never met a Tyrannosaurus Rex or a Triceratops and yet we know so much about them. They are relics of the past. For this project, students can choose what type of fossils they would like to make. One group was inspired by the geological time scale. It was decided that the oldest students would create fossils from the oldest geologic time periods and the youngest students in the class for the newest periods. Another class created […]
February 18, 2020
Integrating Visual Art and US History with a focus on Women’s Suffrage
February 12, 2020
Students will create a mixed media city scape and self portrait inspired by Faith Ringgold’s book Tar Beach.
February 11, 2020
This project introduces third grade students to a simple landscape and it’s different parts. Background, middle ground, and foreground. It is also an excellent correlation with the many folk tales and fables third graders read.
February 4, 2020
Using electricity as a springboard for movement, students will expand dance and movement vocabulary with experiences in the elements of dance which are time, space, and energy.
January 24, 2020
Sixth grade students will learn about the evolution and variations of ancient Egyptian Pyramids. In doing so, they will better understand ancient civilizations and how they created technologies and systems to meet their community needs.