Give hope via the arts to a needy school community

A few weeks ago we had a performance that had, as usual, a lasting impact on the students and teachers. Our programming has many objectives that are accomplished simultaneously, this particular performance was about immigration in the US. We want to develop listening skills and encourage the children to think creatively. By engaging the students we foster the desire to read and write stories and poetry and understand the structure of a story. The subject matter helps to teach about the history of immigration in the United States and to cultivate their ability to connect the history they read/hear to the life they are familiar with day in and day out.Lastly we want to expand their knowledge of other communities, gaining respect for other cultures and their traditions. Finally, we want to promote an interest in the theatrical arts.

We provide guides to the teacher for them to be able to use the performances as a touch point and launch pad for digging deeper and stretching the learning. This allows them to take what they see and hear and build upon the exciting visual foundation we set. We often receive excited feedback like this:

Arianna,

We had decided the best way to showcase the kids work was to display it in the hall so that parents would be able to come by and see their child's work at their convenience.  We also have a huge STEM expo coming up when a lot of parents will be visiting school.

Thank you again for visiting our school and sharing your materials with us- the children transferred their dictionaries to their writing folder and are continuing to use them!

 

With sincere thanks,

Third Grade Lead Teacher

PBIS CO-Chair

J.W. York Elementary School

We are working hard to get these kind of tools into the hands of as many teachers, educators, and even parents as possible. We want to change the face of the student population and equip them for long term success in, not just school, but life. There are many avenues we are traveling down to achieve this: residencies, performances, workshops, professional development, family literacy nights, networking and many others. We are also working diligently to build the structure for an online resource, a Virtual Classroom, that will provide similar experiences online and tools, i.e. virtual field trips, instructional videos, guides, handouts, etc.