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Introduction
Introduction
Arts-integration is one of Young Audiences' core principles, and after co-teaching with professional teaching artists for three years and completing four Wolf Trap artist residencies, I work diligently to incorporate the arts in my classroom on a daily basis. Using arts-integrated strategies is a great way to appeal to a wider variety of learners - some students who struggle with traditional academic skills such as reading and writing are able to express themselves and their ideas through the arts in a way they would not otherwise be able to. All art forms can be used to help remediate or extend content lessons depending on student needs. They are also inclusive for students who are English Language Learners (ELL) as the arts allow a variety of different forms of expression.
Art in my class can take the form of longer projects, such as the scene building and dramatic play aspects of the My Community and its Economy unit plan outlined in the Planning for Instruction section. It can also be individual lessons, or small components of art interspersed in a scripted curriculum lesson. Below are a few examples of how I have integrated the arts, ranging from visual arts, to theater, to music in my classroom in order to increase student understanding and engagement with content.
Visual Arts to Create Landforms
Visual Arts to Create Landforms
This is a Social Studies arts-integrated lesson plan that I co-taught with a Teaching Artist last year. We combined a Social Studies lesson on identifying and describing different landforms with the visual arts skills of creating a collage and recognizing foreground, middle ground, and background. In this lesson, you can see how we backwards planned to make sure students were learning multiple arts and Social Studies standards simultaneously. We also considered how art terms such as "foreground", "middle ground", and "background" could help increase student understanding of the relative sizes of landforms.
Here are some student examples of completed landform projects:
Visual Arts and Theater to Create an Environmental Play
Visual Arts and Theater to Create an Environmental Play
Another example of arts-integration instruction in our class is when we combined visual arts, theater, and science standards was in the creation of our "litter bug" play. Students acted out a scene where a person in a car throws trash on the ground and three hikers clean up the trash and explain the importance of keeping the environment clean for people and animals to enjoy. This was a culminating project for an arts-integrated unit based around the three "R's" - reduce, reuse, and recycle.
My students were able to remember and connect with this project more deeply because they not only drew and painted different aspects of it, but also acted it out. Using physical movement such as through acting and dance helps stimulate memory and makes projects more meaningful by connecting a variety of skill sets, including arts standards, social studies standards, and Common Core speaking and listening standards.
Here, students are practicing sharing materials while creating the car prop for our play.
After our props and sets were made, students practiced their acting skills by using our sun and bumble bee puppets to set the scene.
Finally, students take turns being actors and audience members as we act out our play.
Music to Encourage Fluency
Music to Encourage Fluency
Below is a picture from one of our arts-integrated music classes with a Wolf Trap teaching artist. In this lesson, students first practiced a warm up song called "Show Me" where the teacher plays a beat and students act out a motion to the rhythm (clapping, stomping, or dancing, for example). This creates familiarity with the musical ability of following a beat, and also combining elements of movement and dance . This skill can then be transferred by having students count or recite the alphabet to a beat, increasing student fluency and familiarity with other content skills. This can be a fluency practice, or a form of remediation for students who are having trouble with skills like counting quickly.
Music to Learn the Names of Letter Lines
Music to Learn the Names of Letter Lines
Another example of how we have used music in class to support content skills is by creating a song to explain the Fundations curriculum's names for letter lines. We sing this song every day at the beginning of Fundations writing time, with students adjusting their voice to high, medium, low, and very low voices to match the corresponding height of the letter line. This helps students remember what size each letter is supposed to be when they write on lined paper, such as in the student writing sample below.
These lines are called, from top to bottom, the "sky line", "plane line", "grass line", and "worm line". Our song is as follows:
- (Very low voice, with gesture at knee height) "The worm in the ground"
- (low voice, with gesture at hip height) "and the grass all around"
- (Medium voice, with gesture at chest height) "and the plane flying high"
- (High voice, with gesture above head) "and the clouds in the sky"
- (Voices and hands adjusting to corresponding heights from top to bottom) "sky line, plane line, grass line, worm line"
Here is a video where my students sing this song while I point to each corresponding line: drive.google.com/file/d/14efkAIIOL5aN0FGpfzxKrYjQtmzwfwAv/view?usp=sharing
By using this song daily, students increase their understanding of pitch and writing lines simultaneously, encouraging students to make connections between how music and writing can both follow a certain flow. This song increases student familiarity with our phonics letter formation skills and also adds an element of joy to the lesson.
Conclusion
Conclusion
Each element of arts-integration that I use in my classroom serves a purpose to increase student understanding and add to student engagement. I have found over the past three years that when my students reflect on their favorite projects and activities in class, they almost always mention opportunities they had to integrate art. This is what they remember and enjoy the most, which keeps them focused on learning and excited to try something new. This also helps my students understand that their content knowledge can be expressed in a wide variety of ways. Art appeals to my students from all backgrounds and ability levels, making it inclusionary and helping breakdown barriers for students who struggle with traditional learning activities.
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