Saturday, June 27, 2015
Sunday, June 21, 2015
Find the letters Movement Center 6/2/15
Find the rhymes Music Center 6/8/15
Find the shapes Art Center 6/15/15
Find the rhymes Music Center 6/8/15
Find the shapes Art Center 6/15/15
Friday, May 29, 2015
Week 2: Letter supporting the arts
Dear Parent,
Thank you for your involvement and interest in the
instruction that your student is receiving in my class. I understand you have
concerns over the curriculum I am teaching. I realize this is because you want
the very best in academic education for your student. I want to insure you that
this is goal I also deeply believe in. I am working to help your student and
every other student in this class to achieve their highest potential. That being said there are several different
ways of delivering instruction. We may not always agree about the exact educational
methods I provided, however, with a relationship of respect I believe we can
work together to meet your students educational needs.
I would
like to assure you that the strategy of integrating arts, music, and movement,
into the curriculum is researched based strategies that have been show to provide
students with great academic benefits. For
example, according to the National Assessment of Education Progress art activities
have been correlated with leveraging memory (Vega, 2012). Memory is an important
skill to develop in every subject and is useful for test taking. Other benefits are that art is correlated with
an increased attention span (Posner &Patoine, 2009). Researchers believe
that there are several reasons for this connection. One is that the neural
networks in the brain may connect art with attention. Also, it is believed that a high level of
interest in a subject can lead to increased motivation which combined with
increased attention and directed toward a difficult task lead to greatly
improved cognitive learning (Gazzaniga, 2008). Along with an increased level of
attention I find that art can be engaging and provided the increased interest
in learning that can help the students be motivated to engage in more difficult
learning tasks. Essentially it is through art that I can challenge your student
to great academic achievement. Furthermore, researchers have found specific correlations
between music and geometrical concepts, there have been links between acting
and memory, and art is useful in promoting symbolic conceptual thinking (Posner
&Patoine, 2009). Symbolic innovative thinking is an essential set of skills
that our future citizen and your student will need in adult life. I am sure you
would agree that the aim is to give our students all the skills needed to be successful.
This type of creative problem solving cannot be done through learning skills of
rope memorization and simply learning facts.
I
believe art, movement, and music, are essential elements to your student academic
success. I invite you to come into visit
our class and see if you agree. I look forward to working with you in the
progress of you student educational success.
Sincerely,
Tana Rogerson
Vega,
Vanessa. (2012). Art integration. Annapolis. Edutopia. http://www.edutopia.org/stw-arts-integration-research
Gazzaniga,
Michael. (2008). Learning, arts, and the brain: The Dana consortium report on
arts and cognition. New York. Dana Press.
Posner, M.
& Patoine, B. (2009). How arts training improves attention and cognition.
The Dana Foundation.
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In this lesson student would learn the scientific concept of conservation. Student would also use writing skills to create a poem. Elements of visual representation could be added to the poem. I think this lesson would be best suited for grades second and up. It requires a bit of writing skills that may be challenging for younger students.
To further this concept the teacher could talk about the artist Picasso who used elements of collage at one point in his work. The student could play a movement game where they sort the items (placed about the room) into things that could be reused, recycled, or thrown away. Student could make an art journal out of recycled paper bags. I think there is something mathy that could be done here as well. I think this starting to sound more like a thematic unit then one lesson.
-Tana Rogerson