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.  

Week One: Teaching channel videos

The first video I watch was called, Building Language skills by talking about art. In this video the featured teachers were holding a workshop for other teachers about an arts based lesson that targeted language skills for ELL students. The teachers encouraged students to talk about the objects in the art work, in order to get a grasp of prepositions. First the student talked about the work. Then in groups students used prepositions like, beside, next to, and under. After that student wrote their observation using a sentence structure (Valle- Diazm, 2015). I thought this was a very interesting lesson. On the website the worksheets and supplemental packets were provided, however I don’t think it would be to hart to take the basic concept of the lesson and transfer it to other art pieces and other age groups.

The second video I watch was about a teacher who took his students to an art museum in order to talk about a lesson he had done on Greek mythology. This video was called, Visiting a museum.  The idea was since most of his student came from low social economic backgrounds and had not been to an art museum before, this activity would broaden their life experience. The teacher had the student work in pairs in order to encourage discussion about art. The teacher in this video did a good job of setting a clear assignment for the students to work towards while looking at the art.  He also set up clear expectations on behavior in a new setting (Cooper, 2015). I like the idea of getting the student out in the community, however, if you are not doing a lesson on Greek mythology this could be a limiting exercise.

The third video I picked called, Music and moods: Temp, pitch, dynamics, was about a music teacher who was teaching first graders rhythm. This teacher used one song to talk about changing the emotional content of the song through rhythm tempo, duration, and pitch. The teacher also talked about the creative process of learning, creating and reflecting. I personally do not understand musical terms at all, so I was really impressed with the level of understanding these students had (Nola, 2015).

In the video, Modern nursery rhymes: a musical, a music teacher taught sixth graders music by having the students create their own musical. In this video the teacher was a music teacher (Thrasher, 2015).

 

Reference:

Cooper, D. (2015). Visiting a museum. Malibu, CA: Teaching Channel.

Nola, A. (2015). Music and moods: Tempo, pitch, Dynamics. Los Angeles, CA: Teaching Channel.

Thrasher, C. (2015). Modern nursery rhymes: A musical. Teaching Channel.

Valle- Diazm.(2015). Building Language skills by talking about art. Los Angeles, CA: Teaching Channel.