The following projects demonstrate the power of art to make learning meaningful and engaging. Lesson plans 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.
Students embark on a movement journey to explore many realms of learning. Including both independent and collaborative activities, they improvise stationary and traveling movements to embody and express life science, earth science, and English language knowledge and skills. They deepen their science learning as they embody the movement of living things, environments with different weather, […]
Who would imagine that economics and creative movement could be such a perfect fit? Third graders turn economic concepts—such as capital resource, production, export, and consumption of goods—into creative, fun, organic, and accessible movements. Students choreograph, film, and photograph group dances communicating how the Kumeyaay used natural resources to create goods they used and traded, […]
Students embark on a collaborative multimedia adventure to create narrative films through words and creative movement. Choreographic skills are developed and aligned with science and the needs of living organisms. Students incorporate the writing of a fable inspired by a class book, The Wish Tree, with their life science investigations. As collaborators, writers, choreographers, and […]
Students take a whirlwind tour of the solar system, exploring our solar system’s celestial bodies through the medium of movement and dance. They begin with developing their skills and confidence in moving creatively, translating scientific ideas about our sun into physicalized expressions, and creating unusual statues to cast unusual shadows that can be drawn around […]
Students combine NGSS Earth and Space Science with creative movement for this rocket-fueled learning venture to the sun, moon, and beyond. After developing their dance-making and collaborative skills, students explore patterns through dance. They improvise movements, depicting how shadows change through the day, and human activity changes from day to night. They create positions of […]
Inspired by Brian Selznick’s Wonderstruck, students identified pivotal moments in the story, created an opening tableau leading into dialogue extracted from existing text and/or images, and then performed their scenes. In addition, students explored monologue writing from the perspective of both inanimate objects and humans, and wrote opinion letters to characters from Wonderstruck, offering advice […]
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 to the wind, the students spend nine weeks using vocal projection and body movement to enhance their presentation skills. Incorporating classroom text into warm-up exercises […]
First graders explore citizenship, rules, and making positive choices in a collaboration of acting, writing, and reader’s theatre. In this project, students role-play and use real-life situations to create scenes, each focusing on decision-making. Students share the scenes in a reader’s theatre style format, with a narrator/emcee inviting the audience to offer advice on what […]
By making a book of maps, students explore map making and map reading to understand people, places, and environment. Students create maps of Olivewood Elementary, National City, California, the United States, and North America. As the maps broaden, students gain perspective on how little their community is in relation to the rest of the world. […]
Students take an in-depth look at the creative writing process, exploring the genre of science fiction. They draw inspiration from the writing of Humberto Rivas and experience the freedom of creating customized graphic organizers. As students delve deeper into their stories, they choose a main event to represent through a minimalist model. Constructing the model […]
“Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.” —Robert Kennedy Use symbols and scenes to create legacy portraits of historical figures that have made a difference […]
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 Riordan. In the process, they explore such literary devices as allusion, symbol, theme, analogy, metaphor, character, and setting. Students further investigate ties to Greek mythology, […]