All In the Planning

Teaching Artists and students in Sacramento, California may soon benefit from the newest arts education initiative coming out of the Kennedy Center.

Designed to help ensure that all children are guaranteed a full arts education, the program is a data-driven, district-wide planning model, accompanied by a traveling team of experts. School districts must submit an application. The first city chosen for the model program is Sacramento.

Congratulations, and good luck.

Details of the initiative are described below:

The Any Given Child initiative, created by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, seeks to bring access, balance, and equity to each child's arts education, using an affordable model that combines the resources of the school district, local arts groups, and the Kennedy Center. The program is designed for students in grades K-8.

Kennedy Center staff members work with community leaders and school administrators in a Community Team to develop a long-range plan for arts education that is tailor-made for their school district. The Team reviews existing arts resources in the school district and the education programs offered by local arts organizations and companies. Once there is a snapshot of the arts education resources, the Team develops a plan specific to the needs of that community.

The Center

Next stop on our thrilling tour, ARTSEDGE, a terrific multi-level site coming out of the Kennedy Center. 

Explore:

ARTSEDGE — the National Arts and Education Network — supports the placement of the arts at the center of the curriculum and advocates creative use of technology to enhance the K-12 educational experience. 

ARTSEDGE empowers educators to teach in, through, and about the arts by providing the tools to develop interdisciplinary curricula that fully integrate the arts with other academic subjects.

ARTSEDGE offers free, standards-based teaching materials for use in and out of the classroom, as well as professional development resources, student materials, and guidelines for arts-based instruction and assessment.

Perhaps most importantly, ARTSEDGE is free.

Free lesson plans, and national arts learning standards, all in one place.

Heaven.

Lesson Plan spotlight:

Dancing the Elements Karl Schaffer, Erik Stern, and Scott Kim This list of elements is presented to jump-start non-dancers’ thinking about the art of dance. Space. The parts of the body can be used to create shapes of many different levels, usually divided into low, medium, and high. The levels are relative, though medium usually refers to the height of the body as we walk normally. The body can also move through space, creating directions, paths, and floor patterns. All of these aspects of space involve dimension: the movements may occur in a line, along a flat plane, or curve through space. Keep reading...

I'm In the Front Row!

The Kennedy Center's On Location: Spotlight On Your Community tour bus is still on the road visiting schools to help students produce video documentaries about art in their communities.

When we last checked in on them, On Location's intrepid Teaching Artists were heading into West Virginia and then they hit some serious snow. They were trapped in their hotel and school was cancelled for a week. Disaster.

Well, I am happy to tell you that the crew of the On Location bus have surfaced in sunny Florida where they are going to help public school students make a documentary about a local artist. Here's some reportage from the source:

The team settled in at the Samuel S. Gaines Academy and got a chance to touch base with Anita Prentice, the glass mosaic artist who is the subject of our documentary. The weather is beautiful, and we are looking forward to driving around town to see the bus stop benches Anita has worked on.

They still haven't posted any video but I'm going to keep cheering them on until they do.

It's a cool project, don't you think?

(The image above is from the On Location website.)

On the Road

As you may recall, the Kennedy Center and Daimler Financial Services have selected ten schools across the country for a project called On Location: Spotlight On Your Community. Each of the ten schools gets a media equipment package, and both students and teachers will be trained in storytelling, filmmaking, editing, and producing video stories.

Lo and behold, they're off!

The Daimler-sponsored On Location bus and its team of professional Teaching Artists are on the road. You can follow them on their cool blog, which needs updating, and on Twitter, where I find I am one of 8 followers and nobody is saying much. Also, there's no video up, yet. Seriously, I have been looking forward to following this project since last year and I can't wait to see what the students produce. Hurry and post some stuff before Daimler goes under.

Meta: So tedious is this day. As is the night before some festival to an impatient child that hath new robes and may not wear them.

Drive My Car

The Kennedy Center, in partnership with Daimler Financial Services, chose ten schools across the country for On Location: Spotlight On Your Community.  The program gives schools the opportunity to tell the story of the arts in their community through videos that will be shared on the Internet. Each of the ten schools selected gets a media equipment package, and both students and teachers will be trained in storytelling, filmmaking, editing, and producing video stories.  Daimler is providing the funding along with a tour bus, so the project can head cross country.

It's too late to apply for the Patridge Family video bus to come to your school, but the On Location curriculum is posted online at ArtsEdge. It will take you through all the steps to help students make a documentary that will feature an artist or arts group in your community.

Quickly, before Germany runs out of money.

Free Associate with me:

Daimler. 

Chrysler. 

Cars. 

Bankruptcy?

No.

The Beatles'  "Rubber Soul"