When making curricular links to the arts, big ideas need to be broad and relevant enough for students. Essential questions that provoke conceptual thinking as well as using a student’s creativity is a great place to start when thinking about integrating the arts into other subjects. In social studies, for example, questions such as: what are communities? how do they function? can take an artistic approach whereby students draw or represent what they feel a community can look like. In fact, creating a three-dimensional community integrates math, social studies, and art. When we teach social studies topics such as communities and peoples, we can ask students what they think the art looked like back then. Investigating this, then replicating the art, is invaluable and allows students to think critically by putting themselves into that time period. Students can show what they know through various drama techniques by acting out history as well.
Creating visual representations of knowledge learned in science such as drawing or acting out life cycles of the frog and butterfly, building artistic structures during science class by keeping in mind the concept of stability/forces go hand-in-hand with building/creating. Creating a song or chant to learn multiplication facts, using visual arts (sculptures and drawings) to teach geometry, are some ways to integrate art in math. Even asking students how art is used in the media can open up many discussion points. In language, students can match visual images from literature to music or dramatize storylines and poetry. Technology can manipulate and extend texts by adding images, videos, sound and hyperlinks to create new dramatic interpretations of poems. Integrating other subjects with art provides ways to explore, express, create and solve problems while encouraging inquiry-based pedagogy where students can be creative and have active roles in their own learning.
RESOURCES:
Ministry of Education – Ontario. (2009). The Ontario Curriculum: Grades 1-8 The Arts.
Upitis R. (June 2011). Arts Education for the Development of the Whole Child. Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario.