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Second 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 - Second 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 second grade dance:

  • Moving - Explore bending, twisting, reaching, turning, and tilting in place. Isolate body parts while performing locomotor movements through space. Show combinations of locomotor steps. Explore a locomotor pattern of spatial relationships with a partner.

  • Investigating - Move, accenting the first beat of every measure in 2/4, 3/4, and 4/4 meters. Explore 2/4, 3/4, and 4/4 meters using isolations, facings, levels, and qualities. Create a map of spatial pathways and shapes. Show percussive, sustained, swing, and vibratory movements.

  • Creating - Create and memorize a sequence of movement with a partner. Compose a unique movement sequence based on ideas from the dance elements, ideas, places or things. Make choices about where in the space and when the movement will be performed. Discuss movement choices.

  • Connecting - Perform a simple traditional folk dance and explain it’s origins. Watch a live dance performance or video of a ritual, ceremonial, and/or folk dance. Answer questions about the differences. Create a simple ceremonial or ritual dance. Use an idea from another area of study to create a dance.

Music - Second 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 second grade music:

  • Singing - Echo or call and response songs Supported sound alone or w/a group.

  • Playing - Simple rhythmic ostinatos Phrase length patterns.

  • Creating - Introduce divided beat into a basic beat sequence; e.g., have children create a hand jive to a known song where the actions require a divided beat on count three: | | "¡"¢ | pat, clap, pat-pat, clap. Create call and response phrases matching pitch, interval and rhythm; e.g. have children create a standard call on a school theme: "¡"¢ "¡"¢ | | “What’s your fav-rite sub-ject?”- have students improvise their answers in turn.

  • Listening - Respond to metric beat groupings. Echo/call and response patterns (rhythm and melody). Develop sensitivity in group performance. Identify instrumental tone color in family groups.

  • Connecting - Tell about the kind of music you would listen to if you spent fun music time at home. Share a favorite song or singing game your family might sing if they were going on a family trip “over the river and through the woods”. Share what songs and singing games you would do if you had friends come over to the house for a birthday party. Share a “sad day song” or a “happy day song” that you might teach a friend if they were having a sad day.

Theatre - Second 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 second grade theatre:

  • Analyzing - Discuss the beginning, middle, and end. Identify the main conflict or a character’s major obstacle in a novel or play. Identify the overall message in a novel or play.

  • Practicing - Practice enhancing vocal skills – all involved can hear and understand. Practice enhancing movement skills to communicate clear character intentions.

  • Constructing - Create a new conflict scene with dialogue using characters from a well-known story or play. Create a story using masks.

  • Applying - Discuss the similarities and differences – story versus daily life. Discuss cultures found in stories versus one’s own culture.

Visual Arts - Second 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 second grade visual arts:

  • Making Art and Expressing Meaning in Art - Express warm and cool ideas and things through warm and cool colors. Use an event important to the students as a subject. Create landscapes that show depth by overlapping. Display some textures in landscapes.

  • Appreciating and Decoding Meaning in Art - Create art that has a use such as a vase, pencil holder, etc. Consider why artworks are grouped in a museum. Discuss why artists used warm and cool colors.