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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 […]
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 […]
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.
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.
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.