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First Grade Core Curriculum Resources

Study in the arts is an essential means---not an end---to acquiring thinking skills, creativity, the ability to change, and the facility to teach oneself. In a safe, nurturing environment, the arts enable students to express their feelings, communicate thoughts, explore their creativity, solve problems, communicate ideas, develop a sense of community, and appreciate themselves as participants in history, tradition, and culture. Learning in art, dance, drama, film, and music advances and strengthens motor skills, promotes considerate behavior, ability to work well with others, self discipline, perception, and sensitivity. Fine Arts experiences contribute to the developmental process of understanding one another and naturally motivate students in all their learning.

The Fine Arts Elementary Core Curriculum incorporates four art forms: Dance, Music, Theatre, and Visual Arts.

 

Dance - First Grade

Children have a natural instinct to move - to jump or leap for joy, roll with laughter, melt with disappointment, or contract with fear. Movement helps them master their world and determine who they are. Their intuitive responses and explorations of movement become the material of the elementary dance core curriculum. Through this curriculum, students transform everyday movement into dance by focusing on the sensory experience. They learn to value themselves and others as unique individuals with the ability to move, create, and respond to ideas, concepts, feelings, and relationships through dance. Children discover that, as unique and creative human beings, the power to find joy and personal connections resides within themselves.

Below are the suggested target understandings and skills for first grade dance:

  • Moving - Use personal and group space. Isolate and articulate body parts in and through space. Perform simple axial movements of reaching and bending. Show walk, run, leap, hop, jump, skip, gallop, and simple combinations of these steps.

  • Investigating - Move to simple rhythmic patterns. Create symmetrical and asymmetrical shapes. Explore shapes and movements using spatial relationships. Show the energy forces of heavy and light, hard and soft.

  • Creating - Explore unique movement combinations from an idea learned, experienced, or felt by improvising with the dance elements. Create a pattern of shapes and loco motor movements using spatial relationships. Create a movement pattern with a clear beginning, middle, and end. Discuss movement choices.

  • Connecting - Create a dance about an idea or event from history or another culture. Learn a dance from another culture or time and tell how they have expressed themselves through dance. Create a movement sentence based on an idea from a book, a poem, science or an idea in math.

Music - First Grade

Music is the natural extension of the human heartbeat. Emotions are brought to the surface and melted together with thought by its imaginative rhythms and patterns of sound. It makes work and play more enjoyable and provides a way for children to relate to and express their feelings about the events of the day, their friends and family, differences in people, and the mechanical and natural wonders of the world about them. Singing, playing, exploring, creating, and listening to music will help them to recognize and describe its elements, discover its messages, increase their perception of sound, and invent their own musical expressions. They will also gain skills in working together, solving problems, thinking analytically and connecting with other subjects they are learning.

Below are the suggested target understandings and skills for first grade music:

  • Singing - Folk and traditional songs Pitch and interval skills.

  • Playing - Strong and weak beats Simple metric patterns.

  • Creating - Create strong-beat/weak-beat percussion patterns; e.g., create a sequence of four phrases where the students clap on beat 1 and pat a body part on beats 2, 3 & 4; repeat the sequence; change the sequence. Sing three-note response (so, mi, la) to match pitch & interval; e.g., teacher sings a question and the student response by improvising a so, mi, la answer to the question.

  • Listening - Recognize vocal timbres (familiar people). Respond to thematice or story music. Develop “inner hearing” (feeling) for beat. Identify sound sources (environment).

  • Connecting - Tell about the songs or instruments that other members of your family use to make music. Choose a favorite song to start your school day that might be good for the whole class to sing. Share a favorite song so singing game that you might teach to friends out on the play ground. Share with the class your favorite “whistle while you work” song.

Theatre - First Grade

The Drama Core builds a bridge between play and learning. In the years before kindergarten, when blankets thrown over tables became dangerous caves and parents' old clothes grew into brave, new explorers, playing at drama taught us about being human. Beginning with kindergarten, the drama core helps us learn how to work together when we are people in a place with a problem to solve. Walking in the shoes of others helps us understand others and participate successfully in the making of a neighborhood - be it of people next door or people around the world.

Below are the suggested target understandings and skills for first grade theatre:

  • Analyzing - Listen attentively to a live storyteller. List in order the events in a story or play. Listen and watch attentively to the performances of others.

  • Practicing - Practice warm-up rituals. Practice moving body parts in isolation. Practice imitating characters from an illustrated storybook.

  • Constructing - Create a story told by using pantomime. Create a story using puppets.

  • Applying - Discuss “why” one likes a story. Discuss “read to you” versus a story told by a live storyteller.

Visual Arts - First Grade

The Visual Arts discipline students to take greater meaning and a refined sense of beauty from the world that surrounds them. The Visual Arts give them practice in decoding the worlds of the past as well as a deeper understanding of and ability to cope with our visual culture with its nonstop parade of images and enticements. The Visual Arts give students time to interpret their own lives and to create objects that carry meaning important to them individually as well as to their generation. It gives them a means to analyze and plan.

Below are the suggested target understandings and skills for first grade visual arts:

  • Making Art and Expressing Meaning in Art - Express emotions and mood by including facial expressions in art works. Express emotions and mood through color combinations in art works. Demonstrate size by placing large and small objects side by side in works of art.

  • Appreciating and Decoding Meaning in Art - Practice blocking-in, stick figures, gestures, and triangulation as attack skills in making art. Mix primaries colors to create secondary colors. Change the value of colors by mixing black and white into them. Sculpt with any medium.