Stephanie Jones, Art Teacher
Banner Elk School has just celebrated
its tenth year as an A+ School. Both teachers and students alike continue to thrive while learning through the arts! A+ schools make use of integrated units which relate curriculum content to
a central theme. Howard Gardener's theory of multiple intelligences, which describes how students are smart in different ways: math smart, art smart, music smart, language smart, science
smart, body smart, people smart; is also promoted. It is amazing how students can learn in so many different ways according to their individual strengths! Active learning through the arts
is fun learning and the material is more meaningful to students.
Integrated activities happen in the classroom when the teachers collaborate together to focus on parts of the curriculum involving both academic and arts concepts. Banner Elk School has been
doing many different units and projects to support learning throughout this school year.
While learning about families, Mrs. Ellington's kindergarten students made sponge print people to portray their own families. Later, during a study on geometric shapes, the students created
shape people as an integrated art activity. They attached squares, diamonds, rectangles and circles to a digital picture of their heads and made some wonderful new "students" and later wrote
about their favorite things to do.
The first and second grades have used both art and music to learn about different aspects of their units of study. While looking at various aspects of sound, students learned how perceptive the human
ear is and how easily we recognize everyday sounds. Different attributes were shown through self-portraits, and butterfly murals were painted to practice symmetry. In addition, landforms were practiced in
modeling clay. In January, Ms. Taylor's class studied penguins. They learned about their environment, what they eat, physical characteristics and habits. The students later designed a penguin out of
construction paper that looked like one of the species they studied.
A recent activity for Mrs. Stapleton's and Mrs. M. Waycaster's classes involved some fun with magnets. The classes had been learning about forces and motion in science. While learning about
the force of magnetism, the students learned how magnets both attract and repel and created some "magnet creatures" in an integrated art activity using washers, pipecleaners, and magnetic tape.
The students later explored how the creatures stuck to different surfaces to understand how magnets work.
Third graders in Mrs. Skeate's and Mrs. B. Waycaster's classes used the arts to learn about the continents. In Mrs. Samuelson's music class, the students learned a song to help memorize
the continents and pointed to a map as they sang. Later, Mrs. Jones, the art teacher, helped students construct paper mache globes. In the study of pioneers, third graders compared American life in the past to
that of the present and incorporated several art activities to enhance student learning. The classes made tin punch ornaments, created symmetrical quilt blocks, and sewed quilted ornaments using pioneer fabrics.
The arts have been also been integrated in Ms. Ferguson's and Ms. Avery's fourth and fifth grade classrooms using both direct instruction and the center approach. The music of Doc Watson and the
Kingston Trio helped students use Venn Diagrams to compare and contrast two different versions of the Legend of Tom Dooley while studying the mountain region. Students had the opportunity to make yarn dolls while reading
about plantation life in the piedmont. The students also used "grid stitchery"; to help reinforce their coordinate graphing skills. Earlier in the year the 4 th and 5 th graders looked at the role music played during
the great Depression and how it gave people a way in which to express themselves and uplift their spirits during that troubling time in history.
These are just some examples of how learning can be reinforced and taught in a meaningful way through the arts. Banner Elk School is proud to be an A+ school!