Today’s Guest Blogger is Jan Pierce from Elementary Education Degree.   With the end of the year around the corner, it seems like a great time to try a new arts integration idea.  She provides you with 10!  Let us know if you try something out.  ~EMP

With all the studies out that show how arts can benefit students, many teachers are looking for simple ways to integrate the arts into everyday classroom activities and lessons. Here are ten ideas that can be used for almost any subject and various age groups.

1. Put on a Play – Have your students write a short play about something they’ve just learned – it could be an event in history, a story they’ve read, or even a science concept. They can even design the costumes and set pieces. This would be a great presentation for a parents’ night, or you could video the play and put it on YouTube (with parents’ permission).

2. Sing and Dance – A great way to get younger students to remember a concept is to get them moving. Have them make up a song with movements related to a newly-learned concept. You may want to use a song they already know, such as “Happy Birthday” or a nursery rhyme song.

3. Publicity Stunt – Students can make brochures, posters, or even commercials promoting something they’ve learned about. You could break them up into teams to encourage competition (for example, igneous rocks vs. sedimentary, or Patriots vs. Loyalists). Older students may even be familiar with design software like Photoshop.

4. Mini Art Museum – Introduce students to works of art that line up with your curriculum. Many famous scenes from mythology and literature have been portrayed in art, and it’s also a great way to see how people lived at different times in history.

5. Artsy Social Studies – Integrate art, music, or theater history into your social studies lessons. For example, you could listen to some jazz from the 1920s while discussing the Harlem Renaissance, or look at WPA posters as you teach your students about the New Deal.

6. Tessellations – It seems more difficult to think of a way to integrate art into a math lesson, but tessellations are a fun way to do it. Introduce the tessellations of M.C. Escher and then challenge students to make their own. There are many tutorials about tessellations online to help get you started.

7. Take a Trip – While a trip to the local science or history museum is always valuable, continue taking an art-related trip too! An art museum may have a certain section or special exhibition that goes along perfectly with something you’re learning about. You could also see a play related to your curriculum at a local college and community theatre.

8. Writing Prompt – Use a piece of art, a photograph, or a musical selection as a writing prompt. This lets students’ imaginations run wild and will definitely provide a spectrum of responses.

9. Soundtrack – Have students put together clips of music to illustrate a story, a historical event, or even a scientific cycle and have them explain why they chose each clip. They could also pair the music with a slideshow of photographs, works of art, or abstract images.

10. Collage – This is a wonderful way for students to create art even if they can’t draw. They can make a collage representing any number of topics, such as a time period in history, the culture or environment of a geographic region, a certain family of animals, or a work of literature. The possibilities are endless.

Jan Pierce is a 4th grade teacher who has over 20 years of experience in the classroom. She also owns the site Elementary Education Degree for students interested in earning a degree in elementary education.

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Today, Daniela Baker from the consumer credit education website, CreditDonkey shares some easy-to-do activities that will help develop the creative side of your child.  Enjoy!  ~EMP

It is important for parents to understand that physical development and cognitive development do not occur at the same rate.  While physical development may progress over a period of years, creativity peaks during the early childhood.  As the parent of a young child, it can be exciting to know that you are witnessing the most creative period of his or her life! Creativity is shown by your child’s ability to take current information and make new connections. This differs from knowledge which is the process by which we store information for future use.

According to Arlene F. Harder, MA, MFT, in her book Distinguish Between Your Child’s Needs and Wants, it is not necessary to buy expensive toys to develop creativity in your child. However, you do need to provide your child with a rich diversity of experience that encourages them to develop creativity in different areas.  Creativity takes many forms: art, dance, music, writing and it is important to expose your child to each so they may learn where their special talents lie.

Ask open-ended questions.  When your 2 or 3 year old toddler asks a question, resist the temptation to provide a direct answer. In many cases, your child has already developed their own theory so reply with an open-ended question, such as “What do you think is the best way?” or “Why do you think that happened?” His or her answer may be right on target or be a theory based on some combination of their past experience Keep in mind that the logic of children may wander way off course but this is to be appreciated and enjoyed as it provides you a wonderful window into their thinking process as they develop the cognitive skill of cause and effect.

Encourage Creative Thinking. When you have time during the day, show your child an everyday object and ask how this could be used in different ways. For example, a cup can be used to drink milk, hold pennies, or be even act as a flower pot!  This activity encourages your child to apply creative thinking to common objects and events in their daily lives.

Read Stories. Dr. Seuss’ Cat-in-the-Hat series is one of the most beloved children’s stories of all time.  Who else but Dr. Seuss can make “green eggs and ham” sound like a delicious breakfast? The idea of Green Eggs and Ham expanded into a sixty page story teaches your child how to think-outside-the box and make connections to one central idea.

Engage in Dramatic Play. Dramatic play provides an opportunity for your child to take internalized thoughts and act them out in social situations. For dramatic play between parents and children, ask your child to tell you a story and then act it out among family members Expect that your child will take the director’s role and change the scenario as s/he watches their ideas come to life. Act out all new versions so your child can see how their different ideas play-out in the “real-world.”

Make some music.  All children love to make music with unusual items! For example, place some pennies in a empty soda can for home-made castanets. Alternatively,  turn over some Tupperware for a fun drum set. Have the whole family join each with each member playing a different instrument.”

Engage in art-based activities. Art activities are the classic means to develop creativity in children. The activity needs to focus on the process, not the product. Encourage your child to combine material in unique ways. The following are some ideas for children of different ages:

• Provide a two year old with pre-cut shapes such as squares, rectangles, and triangles made out of multi-colored construction paper which they can the glue together an a large piece of cardboard.
• Provide a three-year old with a mound of play dough which they may shape and offer some raisins, cheerios, marshmallows, and jellybeans to stick into it.
• Provide a four-year old with different color ribbon from which they may create flags or banners.
• Give a five year old a collection of pre-cute magazine picture and have him glue the pictures together into a montage.

Each of these activities focuses on the process of creating, rather than the materials used to create. This is an important distinction because what a child learns about their abilities while exploring and engaging in creative activity is an invaluable learning tool.

Photo Credit, girl drawing.  Photo Credit kids playing music.

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How can a piece of cardboard become an inspiration for students?  Read on…

I finally got the big package in the mail: a large book that I can use to teach some reading strategies and skills to small groups. It looked like a good fine in the Scholastic catalog, so I used some of my bonus points to get it.

But I felt more like a little kid than a teacher when the book finally arrived. Why? I was more intrigued with the box than what was inside.

It’s a great box, really.  It is large, but thin; a tri-fold, much the size and shape of a presentation board you’d buy at staples, with a flap on the top and bottom which, when folded in to create the box, protect what’s inside.  I couldn’t bring myself to recycle it, so I held onto it for a few days trying to figure out what to do with it.  But, like so many things I have kept over the years, the box was starting to collect dust and get in the way.

At one point this week, during the famed elementary rug/meeting time, I decided to just get rid of the box, but I enticed my students first.

“Check out this great box,” I said. “It opens up, it can act as a display, is has fun pieces hanging down. Who wants this great piece of cardboard?”

Many hands went up, some faces got excited and others looked around in disbelief that a box could elicit such excitement.

Knowing that I had but one box and a dozen interested kids, I upped the anty. “If you would like this box, please submit your proposal in writing before lunch tomorrow.” …more disbelief…more excitement… (Fourth grade can be fun.)

I got my first proposal in minutes: “I want to make a display for immigration.  ~Rose”

“Oh, no, no, no. That is not going to cut it,” I exclaimed to my class. “One sentence is not going to get you this fantastic piece of cardboard.”  So, we talked about proposals for a few minutes.  We discussed the importance of presenting your ideas in a format that is worthy of being considered, how proper sentence structure and details would be imperative.  We discussed how some proposals might include an illustration to further articulate how one may use such a piece of cardboard.  Yes, I laid it on think, but the interested students rose to the occasion.

The next day I received 5 proposals, each one was well thought out and came from students of varying writing abilities.  Each idea was unique.  One girl wanted to create a study board that would display important information she learned in third grade that would help her with her homework.  Another wanted to research the solar system and present her findings.  One boy wanted it to create a fort, while another student had hopes to create an “imagination car.”

The girl who won the box was the one who wrote a detailed description of what she wanted to do.  The written proposal was accompanied by a detailed illustration of her immigration display, showcasing her family’s arrival to America and other related information.  I hope that pictures will be forthcoming as she promises to present it to the class when she is done.

It’s fun to do things like this every so often.  I’m always motivated by how some students thrive on mini challenges or out-of-the-ordinary ideas or activities.  It’s one of those fun parts of teaching – when we can inspire kids…and all because I had a piece of cardboard!

~EMP

Click one of the tags from this post to find related posts.

Kristina Peterson offers us this beautiful piece on teaching.  Enjoy.  ~EMP

…then a different question presented itself: “Am I a good teacher?” And he had to answer, “No, I’m not – not always. For teaching is an art: Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t” (Strafford, The Muses Among Us 2003, 70).

Once upon a time there was a young teacher who set out to change the world. She quickly realized that she needed to start in her own classroom first. This is her story.

She began thinking about her love affair with books. This brought her back to her childhood and her imaginary friend Gizmo. She would read for hours with Gizmo. And she would make up story after story where he was the star. Gizmo stayed with her through pre-school and her two years of kindergarten (she was deemed too “immature” for first grade the first time around). A teacher told her in first grade that imaginary friends did not exist. Her therapist (from the parental divorce) said her over active imagination was a problem because she needed to fit in. She needed to make friends. Nobody wanted to be friends with the weird girl with the imaginary friend. Her creativity was squashed.

She became a teacher and during her very first back to school night a parent asked her how much creative writing would be done in her class. She was a little unsure how to answer this question—grad school taught her that academic writing was more highly valued. She told the mother that they would do some creative writing – this seemed like a safe answer. The mother smiled and explained that her daughter’s 8^th grade teacher squashed the girl’s creative writing by dictating novels and forbidding creative expression. Sadly, creative writing fell by the wayside that year, and the following year as well.

Thinking back upon myself as a young child and new teacher makes me realize that I do not want to be the teacher that squashes creativity or tells a student what they think or feel is not right or of no value.

This is my plan:

• I will expect SSR every day, for ten minutes, in an independent novel and all levels I teach.
• I will do this without asking permission.
• I will calculate reading rates, collect articles and gather data to back me up.
• I will invite students to read novels with me by changing they way I instruct – journal responses, peer – to – peer discussions, letters to me and/or each other.
• I will teach my students, not my content because if we really want to create readers, we need to meet them where they are.
• I will not use study guides as “these devalue students’ readings” (Broz 2011).
• I will take on a new motto: “Part of the craft of my teaching will be doing what I want to do and pretending it’s what they want me to do.”

I’d like to say “and they all lived happily ever after”.  But, that part has not been written yet.

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If there’s  one thing that’s overlooked in education, it’s professional development where teachers are able to feed their own fires.  Sound corny?  Ya, a little bit, but it’s true!  If you want to know why I said it that way, read this post where I first started talking about feeding our flames.  But basically, what I mean here is that teachers, as professionals need the opportunity to learn through the creative process if we are to ask that of our students.  We need to get inspired in order to BE inspiring to our students.

You know that Chinese proverb:

“Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I’ll understand.”

This has been thrown around in education as a reminder for teachers to actively engage their students in their learning.  But I think it can mean something even more profound if we take that concept and apply it to professional development.

How many times have you sat through a workshop and were told idea after idea, concept after concept?  How much do you truly remember, let alone use actively in your teaching?  In my experience – none of it.  No matter how valuable the information is, it just doesn’t stick.

Have you attended a class where you are shown what to do?  You may flip through texts together with colleagues, view a video of the strategy at work or watch another group of teachers explain and demonstrate what they have done in their classrooms?  The ideas, the concepts are valuable, but still you are quite passive in the experience.  Seeing it, as well as hearing what the presenter has to say is more memorable, yet when you leave the confines of the presentation, the desire to follow through may be lost with time.

Yet in a place where you, the participant are involved with the presentation, things really start to make sense.  This is where the creative process, a learning process can be utilized to help teachers get a feel for how powerful creativity and hands-on learning can be.  For when we are able to experience it ourselves, we are more apt to implement it into what we do each day.

This past summer, during the arts integration class I taught, the teacher-students were very much involved with so much of the learning.  In fact, I witnessed them each go through their own creative process throughout the five days.  They created things including visual art, and music, stories and lesson plans.  And we brought all these to life through performance and role play.  When reflecting on what they had learned, one teacher said that going through that entire process of creation first hand made the idea of arts integration a realistic goal for her teaching this fall.

The same is true for teachers who attended the Teacher Art Retreat.   The concept of those three days of workshops was for teachers to truly experience different art forms by DOING them.  They created things from start to finish and were able to reflect on what they did and how it applied to learning.  One teacher said that actually going through that process brought to light how she could give herself and her students the freedom to explore and be creative.

Another theme that came up in both PD offerings this summer was that in understanding the creative process by DOING, teachers were also able to gain a new understanding of how different people process things and learn.  In a few cases it was by watching how the other teachers worked and listening to their reflections of how they worked through things.  In another case it was by putting oneself into a new situation by doing something (like playing a drum) completely foreign to them.  (Read that interesting story here.)

In all cases, teachers grew – me included.

One thing that can’t go without saying is that when teachers are put into these types of PD, an incredible community is built.  When people (of any age) experience things together and go through the creative process together, bonds are built on a different level.

Needless to say, I am a huge proponent of active PD where teachers are highly involved in the topics and activities.  Only then will we truly be motivated to use the valuable skills and strategies that so many presenters and consultants have to offer.

~EMP

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Last night I felt like such a VIP!  I was one of only 300 people to attend the Google event in Philly at the Museum of Natural History during the ISTE conference.  Now 300 people may sound like a lot, but out of the nearly 11,000 people here at the conference, I’d say that’s pretty exclusive!    hehe… (Actually it’s because I signed up early and didn’t procrastinate this time!)

Regardless, anyone who was there, would have felt special because of the type of party they put on.  It’s not just about the fancy, way cool food that was passed around  (or the drinks!), but because of the little things – the creative things!

They set the scene right from the beginning.  After you checked in, you were given a blank name tag and are were told to decorate it.  Behind the check in station were high top tables filled with markers, stickers and stamps at our disposal, and adults (all educators) stood there excitedly designing their own badge.

After grabbing a drink from the open bar, we were free to roam the dinosaur bones and the preserved wild-life, but if you walked just a little further (before the butterfly sanctuary) you saw a display that acted like an open invitation to create – two large murals with the Google lettering and tables at each end covered with markers, stickers and lots of paints.  People gravitated to it and added their own “2 cents”  of color as they made designs in the letters or decorated around them or threw on some splashes of paint here and there.

At the heart of the event was the ever present rhythm coming from the DJ who kept spinning vinyl throughout.  There were a lot of heads bobbing as they walked from display to display and a few hands in the air as a small group shuffled through the dance floor.  Eventually, people started to dance and by about half way through, it was a full out dance party!  YAY!

Now these may seem like small things, but those are the ones that are the most effective.  I mean, how often do we get asked to design something like a name tag or create a community piece of art work?  When was the last time you went dancing or allowed yourself to get a little crazy moving to the music?  (Just the other day I was saying to one of my girlfriends that it is due time to go out dancin’!)

Point is that we need time to create in all forms; time to let loose and poke a few boxes (or a few fingers in the air to a pumpin’ rhythm.)

I hope you are able to do some creative things soon: small or large.  We owe it to our creative spirits!

~EMP

Want to get your creative juices flowing this summer?  Join us for the Teacher Art Retreat this summer!  Super Early Bird registration ends July1st.

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