The creative arts program at Metrowest Jewish Day School weaves diverse subjects to expand the children’s view of the world and capitalize on everyone’s learning styles. Language arts, science, math, literature, history, and other subjects are reinforced through various music, dance, and art activities that encourage creative, social, and interactive learning. Concepts of line, shape, and color are studied in each art form along with melody, rhythm, harmony, texture, and form. Students explore and create with these elements as they learn about the lives of musicians and visual artists side-by-side. They study Russian artists Marc Chagall and Modest Mussorgsky in a unit concentrating on “Pictures at an Exhibition,” as well as French artists Camille Saint-Saëns and Henri Rousseau for a study of “Carnival of the Animals.”
Many of the lesson plans are integrated arts projects that stem from classroom units.
Study of the solar system develops into a school play for the fourth grade incorporating recorders, Orff percussion instruments, narrated facts about the planets, and dances and songs written specifically for these students in the style of Gustave Holst’s “The Planets.” At Rosh Chodesh, we studied the Spanish artist Joan Miro’s “Carnival of the Harlequins,” which uses celestial objects (moon and stars) painted in primary colors to display fantastical moving objects; we describe the painting in haiku and create dances to music of 12-tone composers Gunther Schuller and Edgar Varèse. The students generate movements and sounds as if they were the objects in the painting. We then produce a musical composition with percussion instruments to represent the objects in the art and set it to original poems.
Recently the third graders toured the Boston Museum of Fine Arts’ room of ancient and multicultural musical instrument in conjunction with their study of sound. In the museum studio, the children designed abstract representations of their chosen instrument with acrylic paints. We reviewed the four families of orchestral instruments and studied the various instruments played by the Levites in the Holy Temple. We read sentences from Hallel and the Tehillim that illustrate many of the instruments used, such as Halleluhu be-neivel ve-kinor, tziltzelei tru‘ah, tof umachol (harps, trumpets, drums), and we will create our own musical instruments and arrange an accompaniment for our poems and songs.
With first graders learning to tell time, we studied Salvador Dali’s surrealist art of melting clocks in his painting “The Persistence of Memory.” We then created “clock music” with instrumental sounds to the measure of the minute hand. In conjunction with a unit on Native Americans, third graders designed collective art on paper bag “skins” of the Pacific Northwest animals portrayed by the Canadian artist Norval Morriseau. They learned dances, songs, games, and weaving patterns which they presented at our Thanksgiving concert.
Our most recent project, integrating Israel, Hebrew vocabulary, and various art forms, centers on the study of British artist David Hockney. His painting reinforces mathematical concepts of geometric shapes and intersecting lines, with concepts common to poetry, dance, 3-D art and music: patterns, shape, color, and theme.
Three folk dances describing the land of Israel are taught along with Hockney’s “Garrowby Hill,” described through cinquain (five-line) poetry and accompanying percussion instruments. The children then create paper sculptures and pastel paintings representative of the work, using similar blended colors with patchwork shapes and intersecting lines. The main curved line parallels the movement of the children’s dance improvisations and of the Hebrew word mish‘ol, path, in the song “Eretz Yisrael Sheli.” A PowerPoint of the children’s art is displayed as the children read their poems for a final performance with the three folk dances.
Display the Hockney painting and ask the following questions. What do you see? What colors are there? Which shapes do you recognize? Find the curved lines. Draw a curved line in the air. Can you move in a curved path? Find the straight lines? Can you move in a straight path? Are there any repeated rhythmic patterns of lines in this painting?
Play Pachabel’s Canon and have children draw lines in the air in slow motion, up, down, horizontal, vertical, wavy, smoothly, etc. Draw a continuous curvy, intersection line on paper with sharpie markers, not lifting the marker until the music stops. Fill in spaces created by lines with color. Next, brainstorm words with the class describing this painting and write the words on individual cards. Spread the cards on the floor and choose words to a cinquain poem using nouns, verbs, and adverbs in this five line format. Do the same with Hebrew words. Then create a 3-D art project to represent the painting with multicolored paper strips and shapes for a landscape with a winding path, fields, and trees.
The goal of our arts program is to integrate all of our children’s learning into a multi-disciplinary experience that reinforces our daily learning while fostering a love for the arts, Judaica, and the world around us. ♦
Judith Spitzberg is Creative Arts Director at Metrowest Jewish Day School in Framingham, Massachusetts. A selection of her lesson plans can be found online at www.judyspitzberg.com. She can be reached at jspitzberg@gmail.com.
CAT, RAVSAK’s online, highly participatory middle school program in Jewish history, will have four new schools taking part in the fall:
[More]Members of RAVSAK enjoy many benefits which support the overall work of the school and the professionals who lead them. Find out more about membership benefits and how your school can become a member.
Use our interactive map of member schools to find a Jewish Day School near you.
In addition to serving Jewish community day schools across North America, RAVSAK has a special category of membership for Jewish and educational organizations, consultants and companies which share our vision of excellence in Jewish day school education.
© All rights reserved to RAVSAK.
