Music, movement, and art at the Lerner Jewish Community Day School are special and enriching parts of the school day.
Since the inception of the school, music has always been a part of the daily lives of students, from Monday morning tefillah through Friday afternoon Shabbat sing-along. It was the wish of the founding members of the school to create an arts program that would complement the school community, and efforts were made to add regular art and music classes to the curriculum.
Thanks to a $5,000 annual gift from a local corporation, The FurnitureLab Creative Arts Fund was created at The Lerner School in 2003 to fund a part-time arts specialist who could teach music, art, and drama to our elementary and preschool students. Our hope was that the job would grow into a full-time position and that we could allot time and resources to fully integrate music, art, and drama into our general and Judaic studies curriculum. The program began with “art on a cart” and music and dance being held twice per week in the school’s multipurpose room. Five years later, we have a full-time integrated arts teacher with her own classroom, and our vision of full integration has been realized.
Elements of art and music are woven throughout the Judaic and general studies subject areas. “The integrated portion of the job allows me to coordinate with general and Judaic studies teachers to bring the arts into aspects of their curriculum and vice versa,” says integrated arts teacher Laurie Siegel. “For example, in second grade, students study butterflies and their life cycle as part of their science curriculum. I work with the general studies teacher to add elements of the arts to science and social studies. In my program, we dramatize the life cycle and learn songs about butterflies. In Judaic studies, students learn about the significance of butterflies in Judaism and represent this in even more artistic ways. Finally, in math and visual arts, this is the perfect time to focus on symmetry.”
In music classes, students learn basic elements, such as rhythm, melody, harmony, form, expression, and tone color, and build skills such as music reading, instrument technique, and vocal technique. The Orff approach to music education is used to involve students in the creative process through natural expression. Students in third through fifth grade play recorder, and various classroom percussion instruments are used in all grades. In art classes, students also focus on elements such as line, shape, space, form, texture, and color, and skill building, such as use of a variety of materials and tools. Each year, a local Jewish artist works with students to create a project that will be left as a gift to the school. This idea grew from the Jewish principle of le-dor va-dor, from generation to generation, and is a fun way to make connections between our school and the Jewish community in our area.
With the continued growth of the school, our arts program will change and grow as well. Siegel says, “Because our school and the surrounding community, Jewish or not, is so rich in the arts, I feel confident that this trend will continue in an upward motion and we will realize an arts program beyond what anyone could have imagined when we first began.”
For more information about the Lerner Jewish Community Day School, visit www.lernerschool.org, and to learn more about the American Orff-Schulwerk Association visit www.aosa.org. ♦
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