Spotlights
January 2015
Arts in Education
The New Hampshire State Council on the Arts has been supporting arts education since 1966. Since then, the Council has supported a wide variety of projects that help students develop arts literacy and lifelong skills to enhance creativity, improve the ability to make critical evaluations and provide tools for better communication. “The Ecology of Trees” at Greenfield Elementary School is an excellent example of a project that meets these goals.
Working with mural artist David Fichter, 85 kindergartners and first graders, along with teachers and parents, created a floor-to-ceiling mural made with glass, tile and paint. Parents and teachers stood on ladders to paint the top, while the students painted the bottom. The project finalized the students’ year-long studies on the theme “Reverence of Place” and was documented with hundreds of photos and a PowerPoint presentation to show how it all came together.
The project was supported by an FY 2013 Artist Residency in Schools (AIR) grant from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts and coordinated by Angelique Moon, President of the Greenfield Elem. School’s PTO, in collaboration with art teacher Carole Storro.
This project and many others are part of the ConVal Elementary Schools Arts Integration Program, which serves all eight elementary schools in the ConVal District. The purpose of the program is to enrich the core curricula by exposing students to various art and music programs, performances and activities, and often, as with this project, integrating the arts into STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education, turning it to “STEAM” – with “Arts” providing the “A.”
Learn more about this AIR grant project and other arts education programs on the New Hampshire Arts Learning Network website at http://www.nhartslearningnetwork.org.
Last updated:
January 5, 2015
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