The teaching of performing arts has often mystified teachers and daycare providers. This book is ideal to help them overcome their hesitations and begin teaching the performing arts in their K-3 classrooms. Written by a teacher with over 25 years of experience, this book is chock-full of activities that will help readers incorporate theater arts and creative drama in their classrooms - from puppetry to play attendance. Includes over 20 sample lesson plans! K-3 teachers, daycare providers, and after-school program facilitators.

Encouraging both teacher and student imagination and expression, the seventh edition of this classic text helps future teachers integrate drama into elementary school classrooms and introduces students to a variety of genres and strategies, including mime, play structure, improvisation, and using drama the special education curriculum. Unlike other texts, McCaslin focuses on drama as an art form as well as a teaching tool. The seventh edition features broader coverage of middle school, high school, and adult learners.

The Creative Classroom provides teachers in grades PreK-6 with a number of creative drama strategies for use in the classroom, on a daily basis and across the curriculum. Designed for the teacher who may not have had any prior knowledge or experience with creative drama, the book presents activities that are uncomplicated and versatile with a step-by step procedural guide to help the teacher implement the activities successfully. The activities are ideal for the whole language classroom and their multi sensory approach makes them applicable to students of all learning styles. The techniques in the book can be used to reinforce and review subject matter as well as to promote language, comprehension, and thinking skills. Organized sequentially, from simple to the more complex, the instructional strategies allow teachers and students to risk in increments as they try something for the first time.

This resource examines professional development approaches from across the United States to help schools and allied arts groups integrate the arts into an already crowded K–12 curriculum. The authors document the purposes and structures of a broad spectrum of current efforts and programs. Several of these programs have been in place for decades, thus demonstrating their sustainability and effectiveness. Emphasizing the value of collaboration among teachers, artists, educational leaders, and community partners, the book draws on the broad range of experiences of the authors, who came together as a working group of the Arts Education Partnership. Readers will find strong, empirically tested models of arts integration to inform curriculum development and teacher professional learning. Book Features: The first critical reflection on arts-integration training programs and projects from across the United States. Promising practices for pre- and inservice teacher professional development programs in arts integration. A summary list of recommendations for actions based on the authors’ collaborative experiences.