Picture this.  A group of six and seven year olds are studying Africa.  They explore African drumming, learn a lullaby in Ewe, a dialect of Ghana, create clay-paints and paint masks, learn about West African symbols and use those symbols to batik muslin, which is later sewn into dashikis.  Those dashikis and masks become the costumes for their performance, an adaptation of a Nigerian folktale, for which they learn some dances in the style of West Africa as well as how to count and say simple greetings in two dialects from Nigeria.  

A group of eight and nine year olds study the brain.  After learning about the basics of song writing, they compose their own songs about the brain.  Later in the year, they combine their joy of dancing with their study of neuroscience in a dance revue called
The Brain Dances, making connections such as the discovery of electrical activity in the brain with dancing the Charleston. 
A group of middle schoolers learns about Andy Goldsworthy’s natural art installations and creates their own art installations in Touchstone’s nature walk.

The four and five year olds hold a medieval tournament and banquet, at which is the dragon they made -- twelve feet long, constructed out of cardboard, and decorated with metallic scales. 

One 10 year olds' love of anime leads the whole group to explore cartooning, examining the history of cartooning, practicing cartooning techniques, and creating their own comic books.

A group of 11 and 12 year olds explore their own personal history of music, sharing music and, as it emerges from the music and their discussions, learning about musical vocabulary and genres.

Arts here are an experiential adventure, designed to create a life long zest for participating in and learning about the arts. Students coming to the Project Room might be dancing, making visual art, studying performance, or creating music.  The arts at Touchstone extend students’ classroom themes and provide an exploration of techniques, ideas, and genres.  At times several classes, in developmentally appropriate ways, may explore the same aspect of the arts, learning which extends outside the classroom – what a joy it is to see a group of students, all different ages, spontaneously start to dance or sing or talk about the ways a landscape might be painted.   This shared learning along with the many performances, our three choruses (8 - 12 year olds and the Older Student Program, or middle school), and school-wide singing & dancing at our Friday morning meetings give a deep feeling of community and the idea that the arts are a human response to the world around us.

At Touchstone, we honor creation and experimentation within the arts; we also honor the work of revision, rehearsal, and reflection. We place value on all aspects of art – art that is interior and art that is for an audience, impromptu or polished, from folk traditions to formal theory.  Artwork is displayed at all stages; performances may be improvised or rehearsed extensively; musical arrangements might be sung as written or emerge from the group’s experience of singing together.  In this way, we encourage the interrelationships between artistic vision, audience awareness, and an understanding of cultural history.  Most of all, however, we encourage the joy of being engaged in the arts.

The Seven Goals of Touchstone’s Integrated Arts Program

To create life-long sustained enjoyment from the arts

To provide experiential learning that is developmentally appropriate

To extend the classroom into the specialties – the theme of the class continues in music, performance, movement, visual arts

To integrate the arts (visual arts, performance, movement, and music) into the classroom as ways of learning

To provide school-wide involvement within the arts, through large-scale themes, performances, and community singing & dancing

To gain awareness of the arts as involving the same types of exploration, technique, vocabulary, and specialized skills of any discipline

To have easy and frequent access to both good quality materials and high quality professional performances and exhibits

September 2008

Chorus Notes:
In chorus, everyone is learning their round (the middle school students just voted on what round they would do) as well as continuing to learn our big group numbers.  Next week we hold auditions for those singers willing to do small group and solo work in the big group numbers.
 
Sheryl’s class of 4- and 5-year-olds took the shapes they painted last week, as well as other cut outs, and collaged them – the resulting art works are beautiful!  They will be up on display next week.
 
Jane’s class of 5- and 6-year-olds learned more about Vincent Van Gogh and looked closely at his Starry Starry Night painting.  Then they made their own night paintings, using paint over cray-pas technique.
 
Ginny’s and Tamara’s classes of 6-, 7-, and 8-year-olds finished their self-portraits by creating expressive frames. 
 
Kate and Julie’s classes of 8-, 9-, and 10-year-olds continued their study of Georgia O’Keefe by working with bones as a point of observation.  Everyone tried out several artistic methods of capturing bones on paper – graphite, chalk, colored pencil, and outlining with Sharpies. 
 
Susan’s class of 10-, 11-, and 12-year-olds finished their silhouetted landscapes.
 
Polly’s class of 10-, 11-, and 12-year-olds started their work on silhouetted landscape, including their introduction to the watercolors of Winslow Homer.
 The middle school students, after two weeks of gessoing, were finally able to start oil painting.  They began with a quick lecture comparing paints as well as some oil painting technique notes – as them what “fat over lean” means.