Printable Copy: Connecting With the Arts: A Teaching Practices Library, 6-8

A video library for grades 6-8 teachers; 12 half-hour video programs, library guide, and Web site

Now on DVD

Connecting With the Arts: A Teaching Practices Library, 6-8 includes 12 half-hour programs that feature a variety of meaningful arts integration approaches taking place in middle school classrooms around the country. The programs provide windows into classrooms around the country where teachers have already incorporated arts integration strategies into their work. Programs feature extensive classroom sequences and teachers telling their own stories. In each program, arts specialists and subject-area teachers will find ideas and projects they can take back to their own classrooms, as well as insights into planning and implementing an integrated curriculum.

Produced by Lavine Production Group, Inc. in collaboration with EDC's Center for Children and Technology and the Southeast Center for Education in the Arts. 2005.

ISBN: 1-57680-755-X

PURCHASE THIS SERIES
Download

Download: $200.00

DVD

DVD-R - Entire Series and Guide: $220.00

Guide

Additional Guides: $39.95

Individual Program Descriptions

1. Revealing Character
A language arts teacher and a visual art teacher ask eighth-graders to demonstrate their understanding of a novel's characters by creating unusual ceramic place settings.

2. Breathing Life Into Myths
A language arts teacher draws on puppetry techniques and help from her school's theatre teacher to engage her sixth-graders in exploring Greek myths.

3. Two Dance Collaborations
In a first-time collaboration, a dance teacher and a science teacher combine forces to explore the laws of motion with a seventh- and eighth-grade dance class. At another school, a dance teacher and a math teacher work with sixth graders on imaginative interpretations of the idea of circles.

4. Constructing a Community
A visual art teacher and a social studies teacher use the distinctive architecture and history of their school's neighborhood to help eighth-graders see their community in a new light.

5. Making Connections
Teachers of music, visual art, and theatre build thoughtful connections to topics their seventh-graders are working on in social studies and language arts.

6. Exploring Our Town
Seventh- and eighth-grade students explore Thornton Wilder's classic play Our Town from the perspectives of theatre, music, visual art, language arts, and social studies.

7. Creating a Culture — The Story Begins
Sixth-graders develop their own cultures, complete with language, clothing, artwork, and rituals. Weeks of hard work culminate in a surprising twist. This program is the first of two parts.

8. Analyzing a Culture — The Story Continues
Students become archaeologists, analyzing artifacts from other student-created cultures. They then design a museum exhibit from those artifacts. This program is the second of two parts.

9. Folk Tales Transformed
A visiting theatre artist works with a language arts teacher and a visual art teacher to help eighth-graders transform folk tales into original scenes that the students perform.

10. Preserving a Place for the Arts
When faced with budget cuts, the staff of a rural middle school finds innovative ways to keep the arts a viable part of the curriculum.

11. Can Frogs Dance?
A dance teacher and a science teacher ask seventh-graders to compare the anatomy of frogs and humans. Then a language arts teacher coaches the students in a lively debate about whether a frog should be allowed to join a ballet company.

12. Finding Your Voice
Drawing on themes of conflict and genocide that eighth-graders are studying in their World Cultures class, four arts teachers organize an interdisciplinary unit that encourages students to use their artwork as a form of protest.