Armstrong holds first ‘Summer Institute’

RAYNE - The faculty at Armstrong Middle School took part in an arts integration training sponsored by the George Rodrigue Foundation and the Wingate foundation on June 4-8 at the school here.
Teachers learned the basics of visual art, music, dance, theatre and how to integrate them into their classrooms, while also exploring the four pathways of learning: Auditory, Kinesthetic, Tactile, and Visual.
It was noted that by educating students through the arts with the multiple learning pathways, prompts student engagement and allows them to process information more effectively.
During their professional development training, teachers made connections to real world concepts in order to provide their students with purpose and meaning behind what they are learning.
They also discovered new behavioral management strategies, tools for managing art supplies, and techniques to build space for movement in their classrooms.
Teachers were also exposed to lesson demonstrations that used the different forms of art to teach concepts that would ordinarily be hard to grasp for students. They danced through light reactions and frequency to plot points on a graph, explored elements of music using the scientific method, compared and contrasted works of theatre with written text to create Venn diagrams, used Cubism to map out events in ancient history, and created light drawings by exploring the similarities between the structure of an eye and the structure of a camera.
In addition, they discovered how to teach sound through kazoos, matter through poetry, and vocabulary through tableau.
They conquered the week’s theme of maintaining a growth mind-set and are heading into next year with a whole new bag of tricks.