USOE Fine Arts Education
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Kindergarten 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 - Kindergarten

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 kindergarten dance:

  • Moving - Use personal and group space. Articulate body parts. Show simple axial movements. Show walk, run, hop, jump and skip while moving through space.

  • Investigating - Move the body to the rhythm of words. Move to slow, medium and fast beats. Explore opposites in space and shape. Show different kinds of energy through movement.

  • Creating - Improvise using unique and unusual movement. Create a pattern of memorized shapes and improvised loco motor transitions. Create a pattern with a beginning and ending.

  • Connecting - Move in unique ways using energy qualities to reflect senses, moods and feelings. Show how people communicate through movement. Create a movement pattern from an idea, a place, a book, nature or an animal.

Music - Kindergarten

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 kindergarten music:

  • Singing - Simple songs and singing games Natural voice with clear diction.

  • Playing - Basic beat w/body percussion Basic beat w/ un pitched percussion.

  • Creating - Create patterns for patting basic beat; e.g., sequence 4 body parts of children’s choice and change every 8 beats; try changing every 4 beats; change body parts. Sing two-note responses (so, mi) matching pitch & interval; e.g., teacher sings a question and the student response by improvising a so/mi answer to the question.

  • Listening - Respond to beat and rhythm. Respond to expressive qualities (loud/soft, fast/slow). Develop “inner hearing” (feeling) for beat. Respond to simple textural differences (many/few).

  • Connecting - Share with the class your favorite song or singing game. Share with the class your favorite place to go when you want to be alone listening to music. Tell about your favorite holiday and what song you like to sing most on that holiday. Choose a song that you might sing to a sad friend to make him or her happy.

Theatre - Kindergarten

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 kindergarten theatre:

  • Analyzing - Listen attentively to a story read aloud. Ask about anything not understood. Talk about what happened in the story.

  • Practicing - Practice relaxing and concentrating. Practice visualizing and imagining. Practice moving and balancing in space. Practice imitating life – animals, people, sounds, shapes, and actions.

  • Constructing - Do in-role sounds/movements. Do in-role appropriate actions. Evaluate work and improve.

  • Applying - Likes and dislikes in a story. Discuss read aloud versus recording.

Visual Arts - Kindergarten

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 kindergarten visual arts:

  • Making Art and Expressing Meaning in Art - Use the five senses as a subject and as a means of discovery in making art. Use scissors and glue/paste shapes to background.

  • Appreciating and Decoding Meaning in Art - Tell stories about artworks. Organize colors into primaries and color families.