What an amazing week at Armstrong Middle School in Rayne, LA! Teachers at this new Louisiana A+ School learned the basics of Visual Art, Music, Dance, and Theatre and how to integrate them into their classrooms, while also exploring the 4 pathways of learning: Auditory, Kinesthetic, Tactile, and Visual. Educating students through the arts with the multiple learning pathways, prompts student engagement and allows them to process information more effectively.
Music 101: Armstrong teachers discover that the length of an instrument determines the pitch it produces.
During their professional development training, teachers made connections to real world concepts in order to provide their students with purpose and meaning behind what they are learning. They discovered new behavioral management strategies, tools for managing art supplies, and techniques to build space for movement in their classrooms.
Louisiana Tableau: Teachers create a tableau of a Louisiana Swamp scene using elements that are found within the state's geography and habitats.
Teachers were also exposed to lesson demonstrations that used the different forms of Art to teach concepts that would ordinarily be hard to grasp for students. They danced through light reactions and frequency to plot points on a graph, explored elements of music using the scientific method, compared and contrasted works of theatre with written text to create Venn diagrams, used Cubism to map out events in ancient history, and created light drawings by exploring the similarities between the structure of an eye and the structure of a camera.
In addition, they discovered how to teach sound through kazoos, matter through poetry, and vocabulary through tableau. They conquered the week's theme of maintaining a growth mind-set and are heading into next year with a whole new bag of tricks!
Pipe Cleaner Challenge: Teachers use engineering skills to collaborate in groups to build the tallest pipe cleaner tower.
Mondrian: Teachers use scale to transform an ordinary blue print into a Piet Mondrian replica.
