At Milton, boys and girls in Grade 4 dive right away into a fully integrated, cross-curriculum experience. They love becoming experts, expressing themselves in diverse ways, and sharing their growing awareness with equally excited classmates.
"Living Arts," a continually evolving, interdisciplinary program in Grade 4, develops skills in research, reading, writing, visual literacy, technology, math and social studies. In response to a summer reading selection, faculty in several disciplines triggered the development of the Living Arts curriculum. Rising fourth graders read Masterpiece, by Elise Broach, about an eventful friendship between a boy and an artistic beetle, whose drawings resemble the work of Albrecht Durer.
Fourth graders begin by exploring an artist during the summer. Faculty assign one of eight artists to each child. Teachers select the group of artists not only to achieve a diversity of gender, style and time frame, but also to make sure that books about those artists and their work at the children's level are available. Each boy and girl comes to school having researched the artist, the qualities and characteristics of his or her work, and the time frame within which the artist worked. Children have visited museums—or Web sites—to see works by their artists. They have followed an inquiry template that sets up their research, one they will use frequently in social studies and other subjects: What do you know? What do you want to know? How can you find out? What did you find out?
Arriving at school in September, they are already budding authorities. Then the pace quickens and the scope of skills widens. In groups organized by artist, boys and girls use six or seven representative images to develop PowerPoint slideshow overviews of their artist and the artist's time period. They make presentations to the class on a SmartBoard in the library. On a single October day, they all visit the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) and the Isabella Gardner Stewart Museum in Boston. At the Gardner, a docent leads their tour. At the MFA, their tours are self-guided: they choose a gallery for completing a set of assignments. On this day, you'll find Milton fourth graders cross-legged on the gallery floors, with sketchpads and notebooks. They sketch what they see, and then express their visual literacy in writing; they will share their written responses to open-ended questions with their teachers.
Back at Milton, working on their laptops, children use PhotoShop to work with an assigned image. Their task, using the software elements, is to recreate that image in a scale and a modality that would typify the artist they've come to know well. Another exercise in deduction, imagination, and transference happens in the art classroom. A live model, set in a tableau, poses for the children. With paint, in their own creations, the children represent the tableau in the appropriate scale and style.
The performing arts component of this curriculum brings many academic and social skills to bear. Each group of children with a common artist has a challenging task: They must share what they know about their artist by developing a story—with music—to perform on stage. The linked set of scenes must end in a freeze, within a giant stage prop frame. The freeze is a life-sized depiction of one of their artist's most familiar works.
What a collaborative project: The children must develop and share story ideas, argue for their different approaches, listen to other arguments and ultimately come to consensus. Teachers encourage them to "go back to the artist" if they're having trouble settling on a plan.
Then other work begins. With the music teacher, they choose music appropriate to the artist and their own story. They develop the script, figure out roles, costumes, use of the stage and transition to the freeze-frame. Ultimately, they perform before a K–5 audience, a true test of their success.
The Living Arts curriculum takes typical skill development to a new level, consistently drawing upon students' personal curiosity and inquiry, creativity, collaboration and risk-taking. No wonder they are confident "experts" at the close of the units in the curriculum. Add to that, the benefits that all the boys and girls have become fluent in visual literacy, and will always be excited by a visit to a museum in the years ahead.
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