Arts Integration
In our arts integration classes, professional teaching artists partner with classroom teachers to enrich content area skills. Our teachers and teaching artists co-plan and in some instances, co-teach lessons. The classroom teacher identifies skills, themes or content students may need to explore in a deeper way. The teaching artist then uses those ideas to design projects that will help students understand content area better. We believe our arts integration program provides our students with alternative learning methodologies that ultimately serve academic goals.
9th grade Arts Integration Program
Visual Arts Integration w/ various content areas
All 9th Grade students experience two semesters of visual arts integration. This class meets once a week for a 90-minute block. The course is designed use a visual arts experience to reinforce content area skills across the curriculum. Students are exposed to a wide variety of art historical references and arts materials including colored pencils, oil pastels, acrylic paint, charcoal, digital media, clay and paper mache. Upon course completion, students will have a deeper understanding of the meaning of observation, sequence, theme identification, and percentages.
Theater Arts Integration w/ ELA
This class enhances the learning of some of the skills studied in the 9th Grade English class, such as the study of character, setting, foreshadowing, writing structure, among others. Through the learning and practice of theatre skills such as scene work, theatre/image, floor plan, composition, blocking, vocal projection and presence, the student will be able to make connections between both classes, learning how to make literary terms come to life onstage.
Creative Writing Integration w/ Global Studies
This class is driven by the question, "How can we use creative writing as a tool to explore how historical themes repeat themselves and relate to our daily lives, concerns, and struggles?" This course is a reading and writing-based course in support of the Global History curriculum. In the course, we use persona poems to practice empathy and to investigate individual methods for actions and reactions throughout history. In another project students interview community and family members about historical themes studied in history. They will then create persona pieces based on these interviews. Among these themes are: gender roles, dynasties, immigration, cultural exchange, and war.
10th grade Arts Integration Program
Theatre Arts Integration/Spanish
Through scene work, improvisations, vocal and speech exercises, Theatre Arts Integration/Spanish attempts to physicalize the learning of the Spanish language. The students will have the opportunity to work on material that challenges their level of Spanish, be it a beginning, advanced or intermediate.
ESL/Visual Art
ESL students take a 90-minute Arts Integration Class that is team -taught by our ESL and Visual Arts Teachers. Visual Art is used as a strategy to help students with their language acquisition skills. Students work on drawing, painting, sculpture and mixed media pieces to deepen students' understanding of ELA skills.
ELA/Visual Art
Our students requiring specialized instruction participate in a 90-minute class of Visual Arts Integration. The Visual Art Teacher meets weekly with the ELA and Specialized Instruction Teachers to design arts projects that will reinforce ELA concepts the students struggle to understand. Students use photography, drawing, color Mixing and collage as tools to learn ELA content.
11th Grade Arts Integration Program
Creative Writing/U.S. History
Students needing an additional History Credit work with our Creative Writing Teacher to use writing as a tool to explore concepts introduced in U.S, History. Students will write essays, short stories, poems, memoirs and non-fiction pieces that are thematically connected to ideas presented in a U.S. History course.