CNY Grants for Arts in Education - art$TART

Millard Fillmore Elementary and Holly Adams

Quoted text is taken from a Powerpoint the students developed as part of the project.

"Holly taught us movement exercises called Pass the energy, Hey Joe, and Pass the Invisible Ball....The movement exercises were to train our bodies and minds. We also learned to watch for cues using eye contact."

"We pretended to be all states of Matter and H2O. Holly had us be water molecules. Some of us were hydrogen and some of us were oxygen molecules. When we were ice (a solid) we were tight together and hardly move. When we were water (a liquid) we moved around more. Steam (a gas) was racing around hardly touching."

They used their bodies to show different kinds of weather. "For example: a warm front could be scary and dangerous if it brings nice warm weather. We acted that out in our show, our moves were sometimes fast and crazy. At other times we moved slowly and spooky like fog. We used white cloths and swished them around for foggy clouds."

After looking at the work of action painter Jackson Pollack, the students created their own paintings. "We made pictures but we did not plan it by flicking paint on the paper....Sometimes you plan a picture but it turns into something better."

Students studied different types of weather phenomena. They kept weather journals that charted sky conditions and temperatures, and graphed the results. They made weather vanes to study wind direction. They also studied fractals, which are related to chaos theory and have structural similarites to clouds, lightening bolts, and snowflakes.

"For music we did a lot of brain work. We  planned what kind of music would be for cold fronts, warm fronts, rain, wind and tornadoes. Some of the instruments we decided would be best for the music of the cold front. Others were for the warm front. We used a lot of instruments, such as thunder drum, chimes, gong, sand blocks, xylophones, drums, claves, wood clapper, cowbells, recorders, ratchet, guiros, wind chimes, and we had a student conductor. We rehearsed many  times so that our instruments sounded like a real object."

"On our chapter about a walk through the glen on a summer day, we also thought about which instruments would be good for subjects like: gueros for croaking frogs, drums and bongo for running deer, hinged wood-slapper for beavers' slapping tails."