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After reading the three articles, what stood out to me the most was the evidence that integrating the arts into the curriculum leads to deeper understanding. We have been discussing transfer a lot at my school. So much of what we teach and how we teach only requires children to remember or memorize. To achieve higher levels of transfer for deep learning that sticks, we need curriculums that offer opportunities for self expression, creativity, and problem solving through the arts. I like the information in the first article about how the arts gives students a different language to communicate through. I have taught kinder and first grade, and in both grade levels, I always teach writing through story telling and detailed drawing. The first few weeks of the school year we practice the art of oral story telling followed by representing our oral stories with drawings in our writer's notebooks. As students add details to the drawings, they are able to elaborate their narratives. It is the most natural, effective, and ENJOYABLE way for young children to begin exploring the craft of writing. Finally, I would like to speak to the findings in article three about how much FUN the arts bring to the curriculum. It makes total sense that students learn at deeper levels when the curriculum utilizes novelty and intrigue. Reading from a scripted static curriculum will never produce the kind of learning opportunities that our students need. The standardization of education has perpetuated the false idea that learning is linear. We all come to understand the world in unique ways. The arts provide multiple points of access to learning and infinite ways for students to show evidence of learning. Perhaps the next step to providing more access to the arts, as suggested in article 2, is to provide teachers with structures and skills for collaboration on the integration of the arts. The key word is integration. Teachers need to know that they can integrate the arts by adapting some of the things they are already doing. It's not working more, just working smarter.
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