I love arts integration! It has made teaching so much more fun… and students are so much more engaged in my lessons. Using dance, drama, music, and visual arts in content areas allows students to create while they learn, which is the highest level of Bloom’s. With that said, starting to implement arts integration can be a bit intimidating at first. Most of us are experts in our classroom content area but not in an art form and it may be a bit overwhelming to start implementing the arts. For those of you getting started, here are general ways you can begin integrating dance, drama, music, or visual arts into your visual arts curriculum. For this example, I will use the story of Little Red Riding Hood, but the concepts can be applied to any story.
Music And Setting (Soundscapes): What a better way to create the mood of a story than to create a soundscape. A soundscape is a group of sounds put together to make one collective experience. Here is an example of soundscape done by a percussionist. In the classroom each student would make a different sound to create the soundscape. In our example of Little Red Ridding Hood, we could make the soundscape of a forest. Some sounds a forest might make are: crunching leaves, walking, howling, wind blowing, birds chirping, crickets, etc. To start this lesson brainstorm different sounds that Little Red Riding Hood might hear in the forest. After the brainstorm session, assign sounds to different students and create the soundscape. Soundscapes are great introductions to new stories. It is fun to sometimes create a soundscape BEFORE letting students even know what they are reading. Imagine how engaged students will be in Little Red Riding Hood if they are able to create a soundscape to create the mood of the story.
Drama and Story Climax ( Tableaux): The climax of Little Red Riding Hood is when she sees the wolf for what he really is, a predator that is about to eat her. For this activity, students will recreate the climax of a story using tableaux. I like to think of a tableaux as a still frame of a movie. Students use their bodies and facial expressions to show what the climax looks like in a “freeze frame” tableaux. Students work together to plan the placement of group members, character assignments, and expressive presentation to show the climax of the story. This is such a fun way for students to show comprehension of the story climax.
Dance and Plot ( Locomotor and Non Locomotor Movement): You don’t have to be a great dancer to appreciate and use elements of dance in the classroom. In this activity, students recreate the plot using locomotor and non locomotor movement Locomotor movements is allowing the body to move from one point to another ( skip, run, walk, gallop) and non locomotor movement is moving the body in one place ( sway, raise and lower arms, twist bend, stretch). In this activity, students create a dance using 10 locomotor movements and 10 non locomotor movements to create the plot of the story of Little Red Riding Hood. Using cooperation, students would create a routine together to show the plot of the story within the required number of locomotor and non locomotor steps. This is such a fun way for students to use their bodies to create movement to share the plot elements of a story.
Visual Art and Perspective Taking Writing (Visual Thinking Strategies) : With popular stories, is always easy to find interesting art work of characters in a story. Find two visually interesting and age appropriate paintings or drawings of Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf. Start the lesson off with a “See, Think. Wonder” discussion for each painting. For each painting, ask students, “What do you see?” “What does it make you think about? ” “What does it make you wonder?”. This conversation will allow students to reflect on their comprehension, feelings, and questions for the main characters of the story. For the assignments, have students use their knowledge of the story and the reflection to write a first person narrative of their perspective of the story. The added element of reflecting on the art will help students create better written products, as the have a visual thinking strategy of “see, think, wonder” to improve their comprehension of the story.
This is just an introduction to arts integration. I hope that some of these ideas have inspired you to “get comfortable with being uncomfortable’ in the world of arts integration. It is such a fun way for you and your students to get creative and learn :-).