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 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, separating mixtures, and chemical reactions. The project culminates with a dance performance, interspersed with spoken word, to communicate students’ scientific knowledge to an audience […]
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, the culture from their countries of origin and integrating the multiplicity of roles that dance can play within those cultures. Interweaving the learning and creating […]
In this project, students integrate creative movement, visual art, NGSS Physical Science, and English Language Arts writing. Students imagine what energy looks like and create a prop to symbolize it. They collaboratively create group statues to express the process of energy transfer through living systems. Their statues of the sun, producers, consumers, and decomposers are […]
Students embark on a creative movement and visual art exploration into the wonders of our ever-changing planet. Through analyzing images, physical embodiment of a geologically themed story, and tangram picture making, students begin to learn how the earth is in constant flux. Students explore the fast and slow changes, rocks forming and eroding, and the […]
As a foundation for understanding literature and comprehending basic story structure, students analyze two traditional fairy tales, break them into essential story elements (characters, setting and plot), and illustrate their versions of the tales with a slight twist. New settings are selected for each tale based on geography lessons, flora and fauna research and how […]
Kinder students engage in a rich learning journey combining life science with collaboration, creativity, and plenty of dancing. Incorporating a variety of creative movement activities, with poetry, lyric writing, and reading, students physically and verbally express science concepts and processes, such as the commonalities and differences between what plants and animals need to survive. The […]
Fifth graders use dance to explore social studies, history, and ELA concepts by creating an “Immigration Nation” performance. After choreographing dance sequences depicting personal hobbies and future hopes, students choreograph the “big themes” of immigration, such as “opportunity” and “hardship” and write letters from the perspectives of American immigrants. Combining choreographies and letters, each group […]
The double-learning goal for this project is for students to gain a deeper understanding of patriotic symbols, their meaning and relevance, while also developing key life skills such as cooperation, maturity, accountability, creativity and engagement. Students begin their journey with the imagining and creating of dance symbols to express an aspect of their personality. They […]
Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) is the focus for this embodied life science learning journey combining core ideas and science practices with a rich diversity of dance-making activities. Using dance to help difficult concepts become more attainable, students physically depict group dynamics and the monarch butterfly’s life cycle, migration, structure, and hereditary. Through improvisation, choreography, […]
Learning comes naturally and spontaneously through play, and this project focuses on using play to make learning fun and engaging for kinder students. To align with their physical science unit on forces in motion and introducing the engineering design element of making a physical model, students construct a penguin special friend made from simple materials […]
Students combine engineering with visual art and collaboration in this flood-barrier design challenge project. After developing their observation, drawing, and note-taking skills through a series of observational drawing activities, students work in “community” groups to design and build a model town. They deliberately flood their town to observe and understand the real-world problem of flooding. […]
Combining Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) science and engineering perspectives, students set off on an exploration of the properties of materials and their suitability for specific purposes. Students begin by investigating solids and liquids, before homing in on a variety of solid materials, identifying their properties, and experimenting with building structures out of them using […]