As
many teachers know, meaningful integration of the arts with
other subjects is a valuable key to student engagement and
success in the middle grades. Teaching the arts in conjunction
with other subjects helps create flexible thinkers, and
encourages students to synthesize new relationships between
ideas. It also reinforces the arts as core subjects in their
own right.
Arts integration enables students to:
Discover
natural connections among subject areas
Deepen understanding of important concepts that transcend
individual disciplines
Engage in the artistic processes of creating, performing,
and responding
Think and work using aural, visual, and kinetic modalities
Communicate using various media and symbol systems
Combine knowledge and methods from different disciplines
Apply what they learn in one area to challenges encountered
in another.
