Building Literacy Skills Through Art


Book Description

Develop letter recognition, vocabulary, rhyming skills, story event recollection, math skills, and fine and gross motor coordination by creating and using easy art projects.




Teaching Literacy through the Arts


Book Description

Accessible and hands-on yet grounded in research, this book addresses the "whats," "whys," and "how-tos" of integrating literacy instruction and the arts in grades K-8. Even teachers without any arts background will gain the skills they need to bring music, drama, visual arts, and dance into their classrooms. Provided are a wealth of specific resources and activities that other teachers have successfully used to build students' oral language, concepts of print, phonemic awareness, vocabulary, fluency, comprehension, and writing, while also promoting creativity and self-expression. Special features include reproducible worksheets and checklists for developing, evaluating, and implementing arts-related lesson plans.




Literacy in the Arts


Book Description

This book explores the many dialogues that exist between the arts and literacy. It shows how the arts are inherently multimodal and therefore interface regularly with literate practice in learning and teaching contexts. It asks the questions: What does literacy look like in the arts? And what does it mean to be arts literate? It explores what is important to know and do in the arts and also what literacies are engaged in, through the journey to becoming an artist. The arts for the purpose of this volume include five art forms: Dance, Drama, Media Arts, Music and Visual Arts. The book provides a more productive exploration of the arts-literacy relationship. It acknowledges that both the arts and literacy are open-textured concepts and notes how they accommodate each other, learn about, and from each other and can potentially make education ‘better’. It is when the two stretch each other that we see an educationally productive dialogic relationship emerge.




Developing Literacy and the Arts in Schools


Book Description

The teaching of the arts and literacy in schools is often at odds with one another. The desire for schools to improve results on high-stakes testing can lead to a narrow view of literacy rather than one that acknowledges the unique and distinct literacies that exist in other curriculum areas including the arts. With methods of communication becoming increasingly complex, it will be more and more important for students to be able to utilise all semiotic modes. Developing Literacy and the Arts in Schools investigates this key issue in education and offers a solution to the negative relationship between the arts and literacy. Drawing on interview data and evidence from diverse classrooms, it explores the pedagogies of effective arts practitioners and teachers, and how they relate to theoretical frameworks, to unpack the key elements of effective practice related to literacy and the arts. A model of arts-literacies is provided to assist arts and literacy educators in developing a common language that acknowledges and values these distinct arts-literacies. Themes of multimodality, diversity, aesthetics and reflection in relation to the arts and literacy are foregrounded throughout. This book will be of great value to postgraduate students of Education specialising in arts and literacy, education academics, teacher educators, and classroom and preservice teachers.




Art as a Way of Talking for Emergent Bilingual Youth


Book Description

This book features effective artistic practices to improve literacy and language skills for emergent bilinguals in PreK-12 schools. Including insights from key voices from the field, this book highlights how artistic practices can increase proficiency in emergent language learners and students with limited access to academic English. Challenging current prescriptions for teaching English to language learners, the arts-integrated framework in this book is grounded in a sense of student and teacher agency and offers key pedagogical tools to build upon students’ sociocultural knowledge and improve language competence and confidence. Offering rich and diverse examples of using the arts as a way of talking, this volume invites teacher educators, teachers, artists, and researchers to reconsider how to fully engage students in their own learning and best use the resources within their own multilingual educational settings and communities.




The Power of Pictures


Book Description

In The Power of Pictures book and companion DVD, Beth Olshansky introduces teachers to her innovative art-based approach to literacy instruction. Widely practiced in classrooms across the country, the model has been proven by research to improve literacy achievement with a wide range of learners, especially those who struggle with verbal skills. At the heart of her approach is the Artists/Writers Workshop. Through study of quality picture books and hands-on art experiences, students learn to visualize, “paint pictures with words,” and ultimately create their own extraordinary artistic and literary work. The book and DVD explain how any teacher can successfully use this process to enable all students, particularly low performers, to make dramatic gains in both reading and writing.




This Bridge Will Not Be Gray


Book Description

A “witty [and] compelling” true story for kids about San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge—and why it’s orange—by the New York Times–bestselling author! (Fast Company). In this delightfully original nonfiction book, National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist Dave Eggers tackles one of the most famous architectural monuments in the world: the Golden Gate Bridge—and all the arguments and debates about building it and what it should look like. Cut-paper illustrations by Tucker Nichols enliven the tale, and this revised edition also includes real-life letters from local constituents making the case for keeping the bridge orange. With sly humor and lots of fascinating historical facts, this is an accessible, enjoyable read for kids (or adults), transporting readers to the glorious Golden Gate no matter where they live. “Eggers’s featherlight humor provides laughs throughout.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review). “A love letter to infrastructure.” —The New York Times “A story compelling enough to keep adults interested as they read it (and re-read it and re-read it) each night at bedtime.” —Fast Company




Nurturing Knowledge


Book Description

The research is clear: the ability to read for understanding requires a great deal of knowledge and vocabulary, as well as reading skills. By linking early literacy to content area learning, we can provide children with the purposeful, knowledge-building experiences they need to be successful readers and writers. In this comprehensive and practical resource, early literacy experts Susan Neuman and Kathy Roskos give you the tools to do this. They share five essential early literacy practicesâe"creating a supportive learning environment; shared book reading; songs, rhymes, and word play; developmental writing; and playâe"and show how and why to apply these in math, science, social studies, and art so children acquire the knowledge and the skills they need for academic success. For use with Grades PreKâe"K.




Perfect Square


Book Description

A perfect square is transformed in this adventure story that will transport you far beyond the four equal sides of this square book.




Arts Integration in Diverse K–5 Classrooms


Book Description

Partnerships are now pervasive in global education and development, but are they creating equitable, cooperative, and positive relationships? Through case studies of prominent multistakeholder partnerships—including the Education Cannot Wait Fund and Global Partnership for Education—as well as a comprehensive analysis of the global education network, this book exposes clear power imbalances that persist in the international aid environment. The author reveals how actors and organizations from high-income countries continue to wield disproportionate influence, while the private sector holds a growing degree of authority in public policy circles. In light of such evidence, this book questions if partnerships truly ameliorate power asymmetries, or if they instead reproduce the precise inequities they are meant to eliminate. “This text offers a thoughtful look into both theoretical and practical issues surrounding arts integration as a viable strategy for increasing students’ achievement and access to higher education and career pathways. It is especially timely in the context of a widespread focus on equity and inclusion as teachers are facing more diversity in the classroom than ever before.” —Kristen Greer-Paglia, CEO, P.S. ARTS “This book, offering a rich buffet of art-based activities grounded in critical ideas about teaching and learning, includes topics as oral language development, visual thinking strategies, making meaning of narrative and informational texts, and expression through narrative and informational writing. An excellent guide to teachers aspiring to integrate the arts into their curriculum, it is both a delightful and useful read!” —Liora Bresler, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana