619.677.0751 Projects are co-designed by artist-teacher teams to meet the needs of individual classes.
The following projects demonstrate the power of the arts to make learning meaningful and engaging in the elementary classroom. Lesson plans outline the processes students participate in throughout a project, and are meant to serve as guides rather than comprehensive instructions. We hope that you find these projects inspiring. Adapt, modify or simplify these projects to best support your students in becoming active participants in their own learning.
Light and Sound Waves Produced through Shadow Plays
Students participate in activities that illustrate their research into the phenomena of how light interacts with objects by traveling from place to place and how sound vibrates and travels through
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How to Build Your Own Country
Inspired by Valerie Wyatt’s How to Build Your Own Country, Grade 2 teacher Elaine Pompa was interested in having her students engage in artful activities to complement Social Studies lessons
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Garden, Insects, and Birds, Oh My!
A garden can be a meditative, calming space. The use of a garden theme allows students to understand nature from the ground upward. From topics that range from the dirt
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Matter All around (and within) Us
Students embark on an embodied learning journey through their NGSS Physical Science unit. Applying a range of improvisation
and choreographic techniques, students create dances about their investigations into particles of matter,
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Investigating Mechanical Energy with Creative Commercials
Exploring the properties of mechanical energy and its forms (force and motion, potential and kinetic energy), students work
together to compose song lyrics and theatrical scripts to trace the conversion of
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Scientific Observation through Literature
Learning by direct observation and investigation, students create science journals. The journals are extended and revised to connect to the fable ”The Tortoise and the Hare.” Students’ individual storybooks are
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Exploring Life Cycles
Second-grade students at Flying Hills create short plays about a variety of natural life cycles. These include performances pertaining to the life cycles of frogs, butterflies, and/or plants. The final
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Immigration Nation- Hope and Hardship Dance Theatre
Fifth graders weave together social studies, history, and English language arts to create a dance piece entitled ”Immigration Nation.” Over the course of this project, students practice the art of
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Anti-Bully Campaign
In looking at the pivotal theme of injustice within the literary story Matilda, by Roald Dahl, students identify various forms of mistreatment they witness at school and home. Through much
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Art, Orbits and Emotion
First graders learning about character traits and feelings as part of their ELA curriculum. They use line and color qualities to represent feelings/emotions evoked by musical tracks played in the
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Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief Artists’ Books
Through in-depth class discussions and independent construction, students embark on the hero’s journey as they create artists’ books based on Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief by Rick
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Depicting the Sun, Moon, and Stars
First-grade students combine visual arts projects with creative movement and narration to depict patterns of the sun, moon, and stars. Students complete sketches, drawings, paintings, and sculptures of the sun,
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Ratios: Math + Art
“Math is a language through which we tell specific stories about the world.”
Sixth-grade students use visual artwork to represent math concepts. Students learn to recognize math not only in
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Close Observations of Rocks and Minerals in the Geology Lab
Students become amateur geologists as they transform their classroom into a geology laboratory. They examine and evaluate specimens of rocks, minerals, and fossils from the Natural History Museum. Students explore
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Migration of the Overlanders: A Musical Representation
Throughout this project, students investigate and define the events leading up to the gold rush. From the moment John Polk encouraged families to move west for new opportunity, all the
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California History: Voices from the Past
In exploring early California history, students ponder, “What did the missionaries wish to accomplish? How did the Native Americans receive these new visitors? What relationships were formed among soldiers, missionaries,
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Exploring Ancestors and Culture through Movement
In this culturally rich creative movement project, students reflect, dance, write, and speak about their ancestors—the countries they came from, how they arrived in America, their stories and valued artifacts,
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Gold Rush Protagonists: Biographical Portraits Overview
By extensively researching the Gold Rush period and the effect this massive migration had on California towns and mining sites, students develop a biographical portrait representing one of the period’s
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Using the Visual Arts to Examine Characteristics of Fossils
In exploring a unit on fossils, students become paleontologists and botanists by trying their hand at a variety of art activities illustrating the fossilization of ancient plants and animals. “Fossil”
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Developing Observational and Engineering Skills in a Study of Plants
Combining and applying the natural sciences, engineering, and mathematics with sculpture, students construct two-dimensional and three-dimensional models of plants at differing scales. Recording their scientific observations and inquiry of a
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