PAIR

Professional Arts Integration Resource

 

6th Grade

6th Grade: Production Process, Pineapple Rhinoceros

Richards Middle School

Hughes – Meagan Cascone

Learning Objective/Exit Outcomes: 

  • Students will be able to describe the process of theatre production from audition to final performance. 
  • Students will be able to show the different steps through a variety of movements.

Integration Area/Subject:

Theatre & Dance

State Standards:

TA6.CR.1e. Recognize and demonstrate the roles, responsibilities, and skills associated with collaborative performance.

MSD.CR.2. Demonstrate an understanding of dance as a form of communication.

Materials/Playing Space: 

Open Classroom Space

Description: 

We first had a class discussion about what the word movement meant to them. A lot of the responses were “moving set pieces, learning choreography, the relationship of one thing to affect the next thing starting.” 

Next, the teacher told us what our starting point of production would be. This was the audition. The PAIR Specialist explained that we wanted a movement representation of each stage of the production process, which would total ten steps. For each step, the PAIR Specialist got the students’ ideas of what the next step would be and gave them time to create a movement that correlated to the step. The steps ended up being (audition, cast list, read the script, read thru, rehearsals, memorizing lines, adding in some props or costume pieces, tech week, final dress rehearsal, final performance).

Once we had all ten steps, the PAIR Specialist challenged the students to complete this process with their own body movement, 1-10, completely silently and she would guess by their movement what step they were representing. This challenged the students to use all of their body to be very specific. 

Notes:

The goal of this lesson was for the students to really understand how much goes into the full production and to realize how quickly this all has to happen in order to be ready for opening night.

Remember to ask a final question that brings the class back to realizing the goal. Something like, “How long do we think all of these steps will take to be ready? Are there small steps that happen in between all of these that extend the time it takes?”

6th Grade: Visual Art, Body Percussion

Richards Middle School

Purvis – Jen Weisphal

Learning Objective/Exit Outcomes: 

  • Students will be able to infer meaning and emotion from a piece of visual art.
  • Students will describe what they hear when they look at a piece of art, inferring the style of music, instruments used, and feeling conveyed in a piece of art.
  • Students will connect Visual Art to Music, describing the art in music terms, including tempo, pitch, tone, and rhythm.
  • Students will use body percussion to play a piece of art.
  • Students will create Visual Art based on their favorite song.

Integration Area/Subject:

Visual Art & Music

State Standards:

VA6.CR.1 Visualize and generate ideas for creating works of art.

  1. Visualize new ideas by using mental and visual imagery.
  2. Explore essential questions, big ideas, and/or themes in personally relevant ways.
  3. Incorporate a variety of internal and external sources of inspiration into works of art (e.g.internal inspiration – moods, feelings, self-perception, memory, imagination, fantasy; external inspiration – direct observation, personal experience, events, pop culture, artists and artwork from diverse cultures and periods).
  4. Formulate and compose a series of ideas using a variety of resources (e.g. imagination, personal experience, social and academic interests).
  5. Document process (e.g. journal-keeping, sketches, brainstorming lists).

VA6.RE.1 Reflect on the context of personal works of art in relation to community, culture, and the world.

  1. Identify how the issues of time, place, and culture are reflected in selected works of art.
  2. Interpret works or art considering themes, ideas, moods, and/or intentions.

VA6.CN.3 Utilize a variety of resources to understand how artistic learning extends beyond the walls of the classroom.

  1. Make interdisciplinary connections, expanding upon and applying art skills and knowledge to enhance other areas of learning.

MSBB.CN.1 Understand relationships between music, other arts, other disciplines, varied contexts, and daily life.

  1. Describe the relationship between music and other arts.

MSBC.RE.1 Perceive, analyze, and interpret meaning in musical works.

  1. Describe the emotions and thoughts that music conveys.

Materials/Playing Space: 

Students can stay near their desks

Description: 

The teacher started the lesson with a piece of art from Pablo Picasso, “The Old Guitarist.” The teacher asked the students to interpret the feeling and mood of the art, then discuss their interpretations with their partner using great conversational skills, such as listening and responding with ‘that is a very interesting interpretation’ and repeating what their partner said and then adding on their own interpretation.

The teacher had students express their interpretations to the class, including things like inferring the emotion of the guitarist, why he feels the way he does, and what type of music is playing on the guitar.

Next the teacher showed a new piece, Franz Marc, “Fighting Forms.” This piece is more subjective, allowing the students to be even more creative with their interpretations. The teacher asked for descriptive words as well as what each color would be if it was representing a particular instrument. As students began sharing what they thought each color would be as an instrument, the teacher asked the students to express their reasoning. Why might red be a flute and deep blue be a saxophone? The class naturally came to a cohesive idea that the painting, if played as music, would be a jazz song.

The teacher, upon discussing what the students ‘heard’ in this painting, explained that colors have universal sound and meaning. Showing a Wassily Kandinsky, “Composition VI”, the teacher discussed how Kandinsky would hear the colors as he mixed them, that each color had its own frequency, every piece of art having its own tempo and beat.

The teacher then had the students begin considering how their favorite song might look as a visual art piece. What colors would best represent the mood of the song and how would you show the musical elements of the song as visual art?

6th Grade: Poetry, Body Percussion

Richards Middle School

Yelkovich/Pulliam – Austin Sargent

Learning Objective/Exit Outcomes:

  • Students will be able to analyze Maya Angelou’s poem Life Doesn’t Frighten Me and identify distinctive elements as they relate to mood, genre, and rhyme scheme. 
  • Students will be able to identify rhyme scheme and analyze rhythm as they read the poem aloud. 
  • Students will be able to use multiple elements of body percussion to enhance the natural rhythm of the poem. 
  • Students will be able to allocate certain sounds of body percussion to narrative elements of the poem including operative words, rhyme, and descriptive language. 
  • Students will be able to draw conclusions about the poem and about rhythm based on their personal opinion and experience.

State Standards:

ELAGSE6RI1: Cite textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text.

ELAGSE6RL2: Determine a theme and/or central idea of a text and how it is conveyed through particular details; provide a summary of the text distinct from personal opinions or judgments.

ELAGSE6RL4: Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including figurative and connotative meanings; analyze the impact of a specific word choice on meaning and tone

MSGM6.CR.1 Improvise melodies, variations, and accompaniments.

  1. Improvise simple accompaniment (e.g. bass bordun/ostinato on Orff instruments, simple rhythms on unpitched percussion).
  2. Improvise simple rhythmic and melodic variations.

MSGM6.CN.1 Connect music to the other fine arts and disciplines outside the arts.

  1. Compare two art forms and summarize their common characteristics (e.g. between a musical art and another type of performance art, visual art or literary art).
  2. Recognize the interrelated principles between music and other subject areas.

Integration Area/Subject:

ELA & Music

Materials/Playing Space:

Students can stay by their seats

Description:

Students should be somewhat familiar with Maya Angelou’s poem “Life Doesn’t Frighten Me”. This strategy was used in the Introduction/Teaching phase of content learning. 

Start with a quick introduction to Body Percussion (Clap, Lap, Snap, Stomp) and have students practice these sounds as they relate to music vocabulary; tempo, volume, pitch, and rhythm. 

To strengthen the integration have students identify how these sounds sound differently. (What is the sound difference between a clap/snap?, What does a stomp sound like v. what does a lap sound like?) Make sure students know that some sounds are bright, some are muffled and dark, some are loud, and some are soft. 

Now begin to unpack the poem. For our classes, students started with the first line and identified operative words. Then a volunteer was asked to pick a sound to correlate for each of those words. Make sure students can tell you WHY the sound relates most strongly to the word. 

Repeat this process for each line, calling on different students each time. After each sound is established, invest time in making sure the rest of the class is reading and playing along. Use as much of the poem as you want, until students are comfortable and confident in associating sound. 

To debrief, have students describe the sound scape that has been created, and see if it parallels the perceived mood and opinion of the poem. Students should be able to describe how the Body Percussion affected the mood and understanding of the poem, and how the mechanics of the poem informed their musical compositions.

Notes:

Depending on your students level of comfort, you could assign other stanzas of the poem to small groups or partners. Give students lots of room to create their own rhythm, but make sure to ask investigative questions (Why did you choose this sound, what does it represent?)

You could also use the smart board to write in rhythmic notation. Pull up the stanzas of the poem and come up with a “Sound Key” where each sound gets its own symbol. Add the symbols into the words and spaces of the poem for a visual reference.