When: Thursday, June 26 & Friday, June 27, 2025
Time: 8:30am to 1:30pm PST
Where: Zoom
For: K – 6th Grade Educators (but all grade level teachers are welcome)
Developed for elementary school educators, CoTA welcomes:
- K-6 classroom teachers, English Learner educators, art teachers, science teachers
- Instructional coaches, curriculum directors, arts integration specialists
- Teaching artists
What you can expect to learn:
- Three art disciplines – creative movement, visual arts, creative writing
- How to facilitate arts-based, student-centered learning
- How to enhance classroom instruction with art making, inquiry, group work and authentic performance tasks
Testimonials from past CoTA Teacher Institute attendees:
My instructional needs were not only met, I left with much more than I had realized I needed. The experience sparked the realization that what we did was just the tip of the iceberg of where the arts can take my students’ learning.
The most valuable take away was the realization that the arts can be woven into a learning journey through its entirety. Visual arts, theatre arts, and dance are not only an excellent way to begin a unit of instruction, but also to build knowledge of content, and even to assess student knowledge of a unit of instruction.
Download the CoTA 2025 STEAM Institute Flyer
Sessions
Dance it to Life: Creative Movement for our Youngest Science Learners
With Teaching Artist, Amanda Peñaloza-Banks
Whether their gestures express a plant’s roots seeking water, a butterfly’s unfurling proboscis, or the arcing of a rainbow, children attune with nature in the act of embodying it. Learn simple creative movement strategies to help your PK-2nd grade students make sense of life and earth sciences.
Nature is our Teacher: Solving Problems by Mimicking the Natural World
With Teaching Artist, Carmela Castrejón
Come and learn simple visual arts integrated strategies to help your lower elementary grade students become the designers and engineers of tomorrow as we get inspired by the structure and function of living organisms to communicate ideas and design solutions to human problems.
Advocacy for the Earth: Prose Poems for a Healing World
With Teaching Artist, Reneé Weissenburger
Use your voice to advocate for the environment! Drawing from upper elementary grade NGSS standards, you will learn to write collaborative prose poems using CER (Claim, Evidence, and Reasoning) to propose practical solutions to problems caused by human impacts on the earth.
Charting Data: Making Graphs more Graphic!
With Teaching Artist, Leonardo Francisco
Data plays a big role in NGSS — young scientists are expected to collect it, represent it, analyze it, and make sense of it. Get hands-on and bring middle to upper elementary grade weather, climate, and atmospheric data to life by constructing infographic charts with vibrant collage illustrations.