Can you be a mathematician and an actor?
(children): Yes
I think you can. I know you can.
Can you show all the people in the kingdom
how excited you are?
Oh excellent. I am definitely going to
sort you right over here.
That is one excited person.
How many sleepy animals do I have?
One!
How many
excited animals do I have?
Three!
How do you know?
How do you find out?
Because I counted.
You counted!
In real life you are counting and you
are doing math and you're using
technology for a reason to accomplish something.
So why are we counting to 10 again?
Because Farmer Brown needs us to
count eggs.
Why are we counting to 10 this time?
Because lizard needs enough
invitations to invite people to their
birthday party.
And so what Melissa's
been teaching us this year is how to use
our bodies and move like an actor would
as if you were that real character.
So the kids have gotten to be some
fantastic animal characters and they get
really into the sounds and the movements.
(five, six, seven, eight)
(Eight! So four cats and four ducks makes?)
(Eight! Eight animals, ok)
Today we retold the story 'Click Clack
Surprise.' Different groups of students
were able to be different kinds of
animals and then we kind of integrated math
in composing numbers and breaking
numbers apart.
So in kindergarten that's
what addition and subtraction looks like
so when I said I had you know four pigs on
the carpet and then four more ducks came
how many do I have altogether they were
adding.
(Pigs were rolling in the mud.)
Every art form interacts differently with
STEM and science, technology, math.
For drama really its about making those
real-world connections and getting it
into their body.
(Oh, you need some water?)
(Uh oh, okay so I've got to water them.)
(I've got to water them.)
We have a lot of kids that English is
their second language.
Some of them are
brand new to the country even but
through the arts they can, they can watch
the other kids or watch me and they can
participate just in the exact same way
as the other kids.
When we did, you know
our seeds to plant dance, they remember
what, you know, where we plant a seed,
what a seed needs to grow and that's all
done through movement.
It's important
having that shared experience, being able
to really bring out individual strengths,
to recognize that in the classroom and to
also do something that maybe isn't
your strength, isn't your favorite and to
have that experience in a really
integrated way.
When I am doing lessons
like this that we did with our Wolf Trap
teaching artists they're all engaged,
they're excited, they're laughing, they're
smiling, you know, they want to keep going,
they want to do more. They're remembering
parts about a story. They're remembering
characters, they're remembering even just
simple routines and procedures even and
so when you're incorporating all that
movement in those different ways into
their learning it's as a powerful memory
it's a powerful memory tool.
(...ever after. Good job! Yay!)
(clapping)
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