Create a dynamic classroom environment by integrating the arts across the content areas! This professional resource provides artsbased activities and ideas to use in teaching content in language arts, mathematics, science, and social studies. Developed in conjunction with Lesley University, this resource helps teachers gain a deeper understanding of why and how to use the arts to reach and engage students.

This book is designed to assist pre-service and in-service classroom teachers in weaving music, visual arts, drama, and movement into the elementary school curriculum--thereby stimulating the learning process, enriching other subject areas, and providing opportunities for creative expression and self-fulfillment. Featuring content informed by the National Standards for the Arts, the book provides the basic tools and activities that teachers need to gain confidence in using the arts in their elementary classrooms.

With lots of examples and color images, this resource is both a foundational text and a practical guidebook for bringing contemporary art into elementary and middle school classrooms as a way to make learning joyful and meaningful for all learners. The authors show how asking questions and posing problems spark curiosity and encourage learners to think deeply and make meaningful connections across the curriculum. At the center of their approach is creativity, with contemporary visual art as its inspiration. The text covers methods of creative inquiry-based learning, art and how it connects to the “big ideas” addressed by academic domains, flexible structures teachers can use for curriculum development, creative teaching strategies using contemporary art, and models of art-based inquiry curriculum. Book Features: Provides research-based project ideas and curriculum models for arts integration.Shows how Project Zero’s flexible structures and frameworks can be used to develop creative inquiry and an arts integration curriculum.Explains how contemporary visual art connects to the four major disciplines—science, mathematics, social studies, and language arts.Includes full-color images of contemporary art that are appropriate for elementary and middle school learners.Demonstrates how arts integration can and should be substantive, multi-dimensional, and creative. “If you long for an arts classroom that connects students to the astonishingly interesting world they live in and want some helpful guidance on how to do it, this is the book for you!” —From the Foreword by Connie Stewart, University of Northern Colorado

This volume is a research-based handbook demonstrating how to create and use standards based arts activities to teach across the content areas. This book establishes a constructive and reflective process (purposeful planning) designed to help teachers facilitate K-8 student understanding through arts-activity infusion across the curriculum. Throughout, readers will consider effective ways to use the arts across the standards-based classroom curriculum.

The authors in this volume share exemplary arts-integration practices across the K–8 curriculum. Rather than providing formulas or scripts to be followed, they carefully describe how the arts offer an entry point for gaining insight into why and how students learn. The book includes rich and lively examples of public school teachers integrating visual arts, music, drama, and dance with subject matter, including English, social studies, science, and mathematics. Readers will come away with a deeper understanding of why and how to use the arts every day, in every school, to reach every child. Both a practitioner’s guide and a school reform model, this important book: Explains how arts integration across the K–8 curriculum contributes to student learning.Features examples of how integrated arts education functions in classrooms when it is done well. Explores intensive teacher-education and principal-training programs now underway in several higher education institutions. Offers concrete ideas for educators who are looking to strengthen their own skills and improve student opportunities for learning. “Educators are increasingly taking heart and taking hold of arts integration in the ways described in this wonderful volume.” —From the Foreword by Cyrus E. Driver, The Ford Foundation “I find the result of these authors’ efforts stunning.” —From the Afterword by Lois Hetland, Massachusetts College of Art

Practical and engaging, Merryl Goldberg’s popular guide to integrating the arts throughout the K-12 curriculum blends contemporary theory with classroom practice. Beyond teaching about the arts as a subject in and of itself, the text explains how teachers may integrate the arts—literary, media, visual, and performing—throughout subject area curriculum and provides a multitude of strategies and examples. Promoting ways to develop children's creativity and critical thinking while also developing communications skills and fostering collaborative opportunities, it looks at assessment and the arts, engaging English Language Learners, and using the arts to teach academic skills. This text is ideal as a primer on arts integration and a foundational support for teaching, learning, and assessment, especially within the context of multicultural and multilingual classrooms. In-depth discussions of the role of arts integration in meeting the goals of Title I programs, including academic achievement, student engagement, school climate and parental involvement, are woven throughout the text, as is the role of the arts in meeting state and federal student achievement standards. Changes in the 5th Edition: New chapter on arts as text, arts integration, and arts education and their place within the context of teaching and learning in multiple subject classrooms in multicultural and multilingual settings; Title I and arts integration (focus on student academic achievement, student engagement, school climate, and parental involvement–the 4 cornerstones of Title I); Attention to the National Core Arts Standards as well as their relationship to other standardized tests and arts integration; more (and more recent) research-based studies integrated throughout; Examples of how to plan arts integrated lessons (using backward design) along with more examples from classrooms’; Updated references, examples, and lesson plans/units; Companion Website: www.routledge.com/cw/goldberg

"'Arts integration in education' is an insightful, even inspiring investigation into the enormous possibilities for change that are offered by the application of arts integration in education. Presenting research from a range of settings, from preschool to university, and featuring contributions from scholars and theorists, educational psychologists, teachers, and teaching artists, the book offers a comprehensive exploration and varying perspectives on theory, impact, and practices for arts-based training and arts-integrated instruction across the curriculum."--Page 4 of cover.