Arts Integration

I believe in hands-on activities as a "formative assessment" that shows how children apply their knowledge. When we study aspects of countries' cultures, we almost always do an art project. For example, when we study Chengdu in China, we make panda dough figures and paint them. Then we create a fold-out book which tells "important information" written about pandas, one fact per page, written in English and in Mandarin. Each page has a water color picture that the children have drawn first in pencil, then added color. Both project make a nice display to represent their study of pandas living in the reserve in Chengdu. The picture is telling, isn't it?

Wow! Those are great ideas and I can see that you can really enrich your students' knowledge of Chengdu. Thank you for sharing!

Hi everyone--I'm a former high school/college English teacher, reading coach, and now professor of Eng. Ed. I had students write poetry when teaching and also used visual art (drawing, collage) as literature-response. Now I use digital tools (like digital storytelling) to teach literacy...I'm very interested in students having access to multimodal resources (old school ones or new digital ones) to help them express themselves in writing....

Julianna I think the work I am doing might interest you. I am creating a course in the history of art around the world ahaafoundation.org
It is intended to be open to everyone. I started with Prehistoric Art Around the wold instead of taking the usual History of Western Art. I would like teachers to take Marcy's approach after they have finished a micro lesson and I agree with Marcy's hands on approach!

How can we make this part of curriculum pop into an active discussion between all of the members? I would like to talk with teachers about integrating art history and art into the history curriculum. If one of the group is teaching literature I might be able to find images for them to use in the class.