Interactive Arts for Total Literacy

Description

Welcome to Interactive Arts for Total Literacy, a multidimensional literacy program based on the broad concept that music, movement, visual art, and words are all languages, and therefore literacy applies to them all equally. Building literacy understandings and skills in all these languages together should create multiple opportunities for children to understand concepts and gain skill at speaking, listening, reading, writing, and thinking.
Enclosed you will find:

• A book with nine sequential, integrated arts units designed to build literacy in, about, and through the languages of music, fine art, movement, and words;
• Ten musical selections on CD;
• Ten fine art prints;
• Color listening maps suitable for making transparencies;
• Color plate models from several different visual art lesson.

The arts are a lab for learning. Each arts discipline (movement/dance, music, visual arts, and language arts) is a unique pathway to understanding available to all humans. However, each requires planned experiences and opportunities for discovery. In order to learn through the arts, childerm must also learn at increasingly higher levels in and about the arts.

The multifaceted goals of this program include:

• Engaging children in powerful, hands-on, brains-on learning activities to explore, discover, and build understanding and skills.
• Developing understanding and skill in the disciplines of language arts, music, movement, and visual arts.
• Using language arts, music, movement, and visual arts to develop listening skills.
• Using language arts, music, movement, visual arts, and listening skills to develop creative problems solving/higher order thinking skills through a learning sequence that
  involves:
  • Experience and exploration,
  • description, labeling,
  • multiple forms of practice and reinforcement (visual, aural, and kinesthetic),
  • application and creative production,
  • assessment, and
  • maintenance.