PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT FOR TEACHERS

How Young Audiences VSA Workshops Reflect Connecticut Curricular Goals and Frameworks

Here is a list of workshops led by Young Audiences VSA artists,  followed by a sampling of some of the CT Curricular Frameworks that they connect with. Although some Frameworks are listed as grade specific, artists can recommend how to adapt their work to a range of grades. Ask us about Grade Level adaptations!

Artists at YAC VSA build into their signature core programming (Performances, Workshops and Residencies) Four Essential Elements (all of which must be present in any signature core service):

Experience ………. Understand ………. Create ………. Connect

Experience – A signature service will include an experience with the art form delivered by professional artists and will give participants the opportunity to interact with the work(s) of art…See, Hear, Touch, Do

Understand – A signature service will illuminate the art form through its cultural context, creative processes, and artistic expression…Identify (illuminate), Recognize, Articulate, Demonstrate

Create – A signature service will engage participants in the process of creating and empower them to make artistic choices…Visualize, Choose, Design, Make

Connect – A signature service will enable and encourage participants to link program content to personal experiences, other academic learning, and/or life skill development…To Themselves, Their Learning, Their Community, To Life

A Young Audiences VSA artist can provide the artistic glue that connects your students to their Grade Level Expectations.

 A Young Audiences VSA artists can make your curriculum sing, move, speak, RESONATE!

Call us for an on-site consultation. Office: 203-230-8101 or email for information at info@yaconn.org,

Professional Development Workshops

The following artists offer Professional Development Workshops for Teachers….

Sally Rogers

Differentiated Instruction: Strategies for Arts Integration to Reach All Students

Participants will actively participate in learning kinesthetic, auditory, visual and linguistic strategies for delivery curriculum: language arts, math, science, social studies, etc. These strategies will be the tools that allow teachers to reach the hard to teach student, while engaging all learners. Techniques such as tableau, statue-making, role-play, body percussion and rhythm patterns will be explored as hands-on tools for connecting new learning to old.

Song Writing in the Classroom: Using Songwriting as an Assessment Strategy

How to use simple song writing techniques to write songs in the classroom. These songs can be used to assess student learning or to differentiate instruction for those who are not “book learners”. Teachers will experience writing lyrics to an existing melody, brainstorming appropriate vocabulary, and use on-line dictionaries, thesauruses and rhyming dictionaries as tools in their writing.

Oral Histories into Song: Connecting Students to Local History

Teachers will learn how to expand history units into a hands-on local history project with long-lasting community benefits. Students learn to write songs and stories using primary historical resources and oral histories.

Larry Engler-Poko Puppets

Larry Engler is co-author of the book Making Puppets Come Alive (Dover Publications), which has won national awards from both The American Library Association and The Puppeteers of America. He is currently on the roster of teaching artists for the CT Commission on Culture and Tourism.  He is the Creator and Director of POKO PUPPETS, INC., whose acclaimed live appearances have included those with The Philadelphia Orchestra, The Buffalo Philharmonic and at The Detroit Institute, The Brooklyn Academy of Music, and Westbury Music Fair. Mr. Engler and Poko Puppets tour internationally, from India to Israel, Honduras to Singapore, and frequently appear on television, in films, commercials, and even at The Metropolitan Opera House.

Television credits Include commercials and industrial films for The Sony Corporation, AT&T, Hershey Chocolate, Pepsi-Cola, Parke-Davis, Continental Baking, Johnson and Johnson, McGraw Hill, Northern Bathroom Tissue, Canon USA, H.B.O., The Prudential Insurance Company of America (award-winning series), and Proctor and Gamble (nine months on The Edge of Night).

Lively puppet interactions capture students’ (and adults’!) interest and attention.  In this workshop, Larry Engler, director of Poko Puppets, demonstrates ways to involve students in creating short puppet shows based on a selected story or historical event.  Also in this workshop, learn to construct easy-to-make hand-held puppets using inexpensive materials and get an expert’s advice on basic puppet performance techniques that will ensure your students’ success.  Continue to learn at home or school with Engler’s award-winning book, Making Puppets Come Alive.

  Participants will:

• Be able to create simple and effective hand puppets (moving mouth type) with materials commonly and inexpensively available.
• Be able to effectively bring the puppet to life with convincing movements and voice.
• Will have the tools to take curriculum subjects and adapt them into educational and participatory puppetry projects.

The workshop is designed to give specific and practical tools to teachers so that they can use them for the innovative projects of their choice.

Why Puppetry?

• Puppetry can also be used effectively as curriculum based class projects to teach historical events, stories, world cultures, and more
• Using one’s imagination is an important part of the educational process.
• Puppetry is a very useful teaching tool.  It breaks barriers, invites participation, and leaves students with a long remembered educational experience.
• Puppetry encompasses many art forms and disciplines; writing, literature, design, craft, acting, directing, and so on.
• Puppetry is easy to do, inexpensive, and FUN!

Using Puppets in your Classroom to Impact Language Arts Skills

Make puppets and learn manipulative techniques that enhance their teaching skills in language arts for students of all ages. Teachers use their own box puppets to create puppet voice and character. Teachers learn to bring their puppet to life to enhance language arts curriculum.  

Standards Addressed:

• Language Arts
  • Standard 1: Grade 4 – Reading and Responding
    • Students will listen and speak to communicate ideas clearly 
  • Standard 3: Communicating With Others
    • Students use descriptive, narrative, expository, persuasive and poetic modes
    • Students prepare, publish and/or present work appropriate to audience, purpose and task

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BOB BLOOM THAT FUNKY DRUMMING

In-service and Professional Development Workshops

Bob teaches practical, timely, and innovative methods that enable educators and professional service providers to be the leaders of outcome-based interactive drumming (OBID). No prior musical training is necessary. The features and benefits of this interdisciplinary art form include:

 

• The opportunities to lead OBID for arts-integration include classroom lessons, school assemblies, residencies, extra-curricular programs, out-of-school-time activities, and student-featured performances for family audiences. 

 

• Educators can partner OBID with curricula: literacy, reading, and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). 

 

• It fosters “The 4 C’s ” of 21st Century Learning:  Critical Thinking; Communication; Collaboration; Creativity.( www.p21.org 

 

• It teaches life skills to students such as problem solving, leadership, initiative, and the democratic method. 

 

• It enhances children’s personal growth by instilling the values of goal-setting, hard work, perseverance, responsibility, and discipline.

 

• Following practices of higher order thinking, OBID helps kinesthetic, visual, and aural learners to reach GLE’s (Grade Level Expectations). 

 

• The outcomes can be assessed and reported according to “Common Core State Standards”  www.corestandards.org  

 

• The catchy beats and melodies engage students of all ages and abilities.

 Students are inspired to sign up for formal school music programs

MIKE KACHUBA

SONGWRITING TO THE CMTS FOR – A METHOD OF WRITING AND ASSESSMENT IN THE CLASSROOM SETTING

Objective: To demonstrate songwriting as a multiple intelligence based writing skill that can be incorporated into the CMT Language Arts preparation and to demonstrate how songwriting can be used as an assessment tool.

Goals: Teachers will learn and be able to use basic “songwriting for non-musician” concepts so that these concepts will be utilized in a classroom setting as a method for students to prepare for the CMT Language Arts.

Overview: Song writing is an excellent way to learn succinct writing techniques. Using samples from the open-ended writing section from the Language Arts CMT Handbook teachers will learn how to write songs with students and address the CT State Department of Education’s Position Statement on Language Arts, especially as it pertains to writing in a variety of formats, reading and interpreting texts, composing, revising and editing written materials, and communicating with others. In addition, this workshop will help create classrooms that are rich learning environments fostering literacy in all students.

Outline of Workshop:

Introduction to song structure and samples of student work

Getting to the heart of the story

Reading and recalling a piece of literature

Critical assessment of the story

Building a lyric model

Adding melody

2.Uncover new ways to introduce concepts and provide assessment opportunities with the use of theatre strategies and techniques. No longer just a school play, the use of theatre arts integrated lessons helps students think MIKE KACHUBA

LITERACY, MUSIC AND ART

Songwriter, Master Teaching Artist and former teacher, Mike Kachuba, leads this professional development workshop that focuses on connecting selected artwork from the New Britain Museum of American Art to writing and the Connecticut curriculum standards. Teachers will learn how both visual art and song writing can be used in the classroom to teach curricular concepts; and how to write a song, even with limited formal knowledge of music concepts. Communication through visual art work and song writing is explored. This workshop is for general educators, music, language and visual art specialists.

Fee: $540 for 2 hour workshop, $745 for 4 hours

LESLIE BULION

SCIENCE IS PURE POETRY

Children’s author Leslie Bulion leads this interdisciplinary workshop that connects the language and concepts of science to the art of writing poetry and visual arts. Teachers will learn how poetry can be used in the classroom to further science curricula and how science can provide the building blocks for entertaining and creative poetry. Teachers will explore the basic form and function of poetry and will practice writing science-based poems.

Fee: $540 for 2 hour workshop, $745 for 4 hours

ANNE PASQUALE

USING THEATRE IN YOUR CLASSROOM

A unique hands-on workshop in teaching across the curriculum via theatrical improvisation . Employing the art form as taught by Viola Spolin ,teachers will gain a myriad of tools for communicating complicated curriculum concepts in Science, Social Studies, History and Literature in a non-static and kinesthetically joyful way. Concrete examples of curriculum as catalysts such as : primary sources , historical events, patterns of social change classroom texts etc., will be employed as participants , play creative dramatic games,create storyboards, write and or perform dramatic skits all while having fun.

Fee: $675 for a 2 hour workshop, $945 for 4 hour workshop

SUSAN ROSANO

EXPRESSIVE ARTS

Dance & Movement in the Classroom – This session will teach the basics of doing dance & movement exercises in the classroom for children of all ages, from pre-school to sixth grade. Aside from the physical benefits, dance & movement exercises provide calming sensory integration, feelings of community, cooperation and can be tied in to classroom subjects. This session will start out with sensory integration dances and end with a dance circle. Teachers will practice facilitating during this session.

Poetry and Journaling in the Classroom – Facilitating poetry writing with students and techniques for eliciting feelings through writing will be explored. Classroom creation of poems that include emotional expression, personal histories and memoirs will be taught. Forms that help with the writing of poems to express feelings will be constructed.

Fee: $540 for 2 hour workshop, $745 for 4 hours

CLAUDIA MATTHISON

VISUAL ART

An artist and educator, Claudia has brought her unique blend of traditional crafts and culture to the Wadsworth Athenaeum, the Mattatuck Museum, Guilford Art Center, and schools and libraries throughout New England. She holds a masters degree in Art Education and is on the faculty at the Guilford Art Center where she has taught teacher in service programs and art educational workshops for C. E. U. credit. Claudia’s diverse background in the arts and cultures enables her to bring the highest quality program to educators from varying disciplines.

Social Studies, Language Arts, and Math for Grades K to 6 -Claudia teaches fun and educational hands on art and craft workshops that easily translate to a classroom setting and will compliment social studies or language art programs. Her workshops give the classroom teacher the confidence to bring the arts to their students and a better understanding of how traditional crafts were created. Claudia will discuss methods to make all projects age appropriate.

Colonial American Workshops:

Basket Weaving: Each teacher will weave a small basket with a wooden base and natural reed.

Patchwork Quilt: Basic quilting techniques will be demonstrated and teachers will make a small patchwork pillow.

Canvas Journal and Ships Log: Bookbinding, calligraphy, stenciling and sailing ships will be discussed while each participant creates their own canvas journal. The class will have an opportunity to experiment writing with a quill feather pen.

Painted Floor Cloth: Painting techniques such as sponging, stenciling, rag rolling and tape designs will be incorporated into one of a kind floor cloths similar to the type made in Colonial America.

Native American Workshops: Basket Weaving/Same as above. Canvas Par fleche Bag bags were traditionally made from animal hides. Teachers will sew a canvas bag that will be decorated with colorful symbols and beads.

Navaho Sand Painting, Dry sand designs are said, by the Navaho, to represent ancient paintings done on the clouds by the Gods. Sand painting will be made using colorful sand on boards.

Multi Cultural Crafts-African Adinkra Cloth: Colorful fabric, paint, stamps and thread will be used to embellish a traditional Adinkra Cloth from Africa. The children’s book, “The Talking Cloth” will be discussed. Basket Weaving / same as above

Mexican Day of the Dead Celebration of Crafts: El dia de los muertos, or day of the dead, is one of Mexico’s most important celebrations. The beautifully illustrated children’s book “Day of the Dead Celebration” will be discussed. Traditional project could include decorative sugar skulls, tin ornaments, a retablo or fanciful skeletons.

Math Quilts and Math: Basic quilting techniques will be demonstrated and teachers will design and sew a small patchwork pillow. Teachers will be able to assist their students with recognizing symmetry, exploring fractions within a quilt square, identifying patterns in quilts and the environment and explaining the aesthetic qualities of a quilt.

Fee: $540 for 2 hour workshop, $745 for 4 hours

Sarah D. Haskell

Sarah D. Haskell is an award winning artist/educator who has been weaving and teaching for over twenty five years. She is an active artist in schools, communities and institutions in New England as well as a faculty member at Heartwood College of Art, Kennebunkport, ME. She has trained with the Kennedy Center for the Arts Education Program and the Creative Center, New York, NY.

Read Between the Lines: Integrating Weaving with Language Arts

Have you ever noticed that weaving and written text have a lot in common? Both written text and weaving are built with lines of information. In writing, we use words to build our stories and tell our information. In weaving, we use a variety of materials from yarns to plastic, leather, ribbon, paper, and fabric to tell our stories.

This Hands-On workshop will introduce tools and techniques for integrating weaving and language arts.

Using readily available, inexpensive weaving materials and equipment, we will build weavings that become a threshold for a piece of writing. These weavings will spring from a story such as the Greek myth of Philomela and Procne, or personal anecdotes.

From this weaving, grows a writing, followed by a time for sharing. This writing then becomes a doorway for a new weaving.

Weavings are built line by line in a methodical and meditative process. During this process, the mind wanders, travels, and comes back to focus. Each line we put into our weavings becomes rich with thought and encoded with information.

The weaving becomes a language which can be translated into written text. The beauty of this process is in its simplicity, and its accessibility to all ages and abilities of participants.

Resource materials and handouts are provided for participants to support the weaving and writing process. “Read Between the Lines” is a magical process for self discovery, and will produce successful and surprising results for every artist/author.

Materials fee: approximately $5.00 per participants for fibers, looms, papers, glue, drawing materials, and assorted equipment. Participants can bring: magazines, fancy papers, photos, yarns and other fiber materials such as ribbon, string, fabric, lace, wire, tubes, plastic, and leather.

Brian Gillie

Program Name: Teacher Training in Dance: Ballroom, Folk, Swing, Hip Hop and Student Choreography

Teacher In-Service Residencies: These extended workshops help teachers become familiar with all the tools necessary for bringing dance into the lives of their pupils. Teachers will learn important information about: designing the space, music selections, how body parts work in isolation and in combination, concepts of strength, endurance, patterns and rhythms, interaction with the students and the issue of “boys vs. girls,” movement exercises, demonstration, ice-breaking activities, structures of the various dances, stringing steps together, inventing a dance from scratch, group evaluation and much more. You do not need to be a dancer to provide an excellent atmosphere effective dance experience.

Workshop Description:

These teacher in-service workshops and residency programs are designed to address and enhance the critical thinking skills of your emerging artists. Studies show that accessing personal awareness through the arts enables students to achieve empowerment and leadership skills. Through the camaraderie of team accomplishment, dancing has a “force” to build community and to facilitate communication, transformation and growth. Students learn that their thinking “matters,” and that inspiration comes from both the mind and the heart.

CT Academic Standards for Dance call for students to create, evaluate and perform art works that express concepts of dance. Dance history illuminates human experience and values and reveals facets of different cultures. In creating dances students learn to apply choreographic principals and analytical thinking and to make connections between dance, personal accomplishment and healthful living.

Teachers will learn to help students to improvise, to build a complete dance form a single phrase, to explore the joys of solo, partnered and team composition, and to feel history come alive by doing authentic steps from our diverse dance heritage. Brian helps faculty prepare for a high quality performance or video. Teachers will also learn sequential and effective ways of implementing safe and rewarding techniques for providing positive, doable and memorable dance experiences for even the most reluctant students.

Studies show (the Mozart Effect and learning curves based on the Multiple Intelligences) that early movement experiences improve overall academic performance and well-being.

Teachers will become versed in training techniques that address the following four areas of dance:

Never Too Small To Boogie, for grades K – 2. This workshop addresses CT State Academic Standards for Dance in learning basic loco-motor movements, spatial concepts, accuracy in moving to a musical beat, memorizing simple movement phrases, working alone and with a partner, creating and performing simple dances, learning some simple folk dances and evaluating dance styles and performance. The workshops advance the theories of multiple intelligences by providing opportunities to build a dance by adding the movement of one body part to another, then changing the rules by doing it low, large, in reverse, in slow-motion, etc. Movement exploration is essential for accessing information on one’s own strength, balance, coordination and what the body is capable of doing.

American Folk Dances from 1700 – 1930, for grades 3 – 8. This workshop addresses CT State Academic Standards for Dance in learning about the principals of alignment, balance and articulation of body parts; the memorization and reproduction of movement sequences; demonstrating ABA, canon and call and response patterns; creating sequences that repeat, contrast and lead to a climax; working cooperatively in small groups; supporting and counter-balancing the weight of a partner; learning and understanding social and theatrical dances from a broad spectrum of history; describing, comparing and contrasting the roles of dance in different cultures; creating duets and rounds; creating warm-up exercises; and assessing the health benefits of dance, Students learn specific solo, group and partnered dances and their origins and histories from this span of two hundred years and include: circle dances, line dances, square dances, grand march, clog, cakewalk, one-step, grizzly bear, slow drag, camel walk, ragtime dances, blues dances and charleston.

Ballroom and Rock Dances of the Last 100 Years, for grades 3 – 12. This workshop addresses the CT State Academic Standards for Dance as stated in number 2 above. Students learn the major social dances of the past century, their origins and histories: waltz, polka, foxtrot, tango, swing, rumba, cha cha, merengue, samba, stroll, twist, ‘60s rock dances, moonwalk, robotics and hip hop.

Swing Dance Intensive, for grades 4 – 12. This workshop addresses CT State Academic Standards for Dance as stated in number 2 above. Students learn the origins and history of swing, then master the high-energy partnered jumps, kicks, turns and fancy footwork that made swing dancing America’s favorite dance. Students learn a three-minute swing dance routine.

DENNIS WARING

The TransAtlantic Experience for Teachers

Through fun, informed musical activity featuring the latest techniques and resources, ethnomusicologist Dr. Dennis Waring involves participants in song and instrument play representative of three interconnected cultural traditions: Africa, Cuba, and Brazil. By singing and drumming traditional music of Africa, playing characteristic Cuban rhythms, and experiencing the Brazilian samba, participants will more fully appreciate how four hundred years of intersecting musical folkways have shaped a large portion of today’s global expressive culture. This show is intended for small to medium-size groups for maximum participation.

Africa

After an introduction to instruments found in a typical drumming ensemble of West Africa (bells, rattles, various drums), and viewing an introductory video, players will learn simple songs and create traditional polyrhythms characteristic to the culture. A follow-up activity of learning a recreational piece from Ghana called Gahu.

Cuba

Cuba offers the greatest insight of how African music influenced the music of many Latin American countries. By learning about the various percussion instruments in a standard Cuban rhythm ensemble (cowbell, claves, maracas, bongos, conga drums), paraticipants experience through playing how the intricate polyrhythms fit together. Further insight into various styles of Cuban music such as mambo, chachacha, rumba, and santeria, provide special understanding of Cuban culture in general.

Brazil

Brazil is musically noteworthy for the samba. The street samba or batucada samba, heard during the annual Carnival festivities, is most interesting for its special percussion instruments (surdo, reco-reco, ganza, panderio, etc.). Invariably involving song and dance, the samba is known around the world for its intoxicating, driving rhythms and spirit.

Teachers will gain:

- A working knowledge of selected world drumming traditions—their history, music literature, and sources in art and folk traditions.

- An awareness of the pluralistic nature of most musical traditions.

-An understanding of various culture’s musical organization form many perspectives: value systems, relationships to language, musical structure, transmission strategies, social hierarchies and, within their socio-cultural contexts, the relationship of music to the other arts, religion, philosophy, and human values.

-An understanding of the fine points of performance, improvisation, and composition in more than one tradition.

-An understanding of the political, social, technological and economic factors which affect the arts in various cultures in order to make informed decisions as listeners, composers, consumers, and/or patrons, taxpayers, and voters.

-An appreciation of classical, folk, tribal and popular musics as essential to a population’s local, regional, national and global identity.

-Development of non-ethnocentric views and positive attitudes regarding diversity issues.

-Recognition of the interconnectedness of all subject disciplines.