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Round Valley Arts Curriculum

I. ARTISTIC PERCEPTION AND RESPONSE

Students begin to be aware of the aural, kinesthetic, and visual properties of drama.  They talk about these properties and components as they listen to songs, musical games, poems, rhymes, and stories from various world cultures.  When involved in drama experiences, students:

1.      Iisten for ideas, characters, rhythm and movement,

2.      create pictures in their minds as they listen,

3.      identify simple narrative,

4.      sequence events in stories,

5.      identify movements of characters in rhymes and stories,

6.      use their bodies to move as objects, animals or people they have observed.

Students will be exposed to these terms:

II. CREATIVE EXPRESSION

Students communicate observations, feelings, ideas and experiences about their own world. They create drama based on real events, stories, poems, and places, as well as their imagination, developing the following foundational skills.

1.      Nonverbal (awareness of body, movement, and space)

·        Create shapes and statues with their bodies.

·        Translate simple words such as straight, curved, flat, bent, and twisted into frozen and moving shapes.

·        Roll, crawl, skip, bounce, tip-toe, hop, gallop, slide, and jump.

·        Identify how each part of the body moves and move each part in at least two different ways

2.      Verbal

·        Experiment with lip and tongue movements.

·        Play with rhyming sounds (diction rhymes).

3.      Storytelling

·        Tell a simple story or relate an experience, attending to sequence, audibility, vocal variety and facial expression.

·        Use a puppet to help tell a story.

4.      Improvisation

·        Improvise action and movement to go with rhymes and stories.

·        Improvise movement to explore ideas about plants and animals.

·        Improvise imagined special and wonderful things, such as toys or gifts emerging from a package.

5.      Performance

·        Perform simply for classmates using these skills and ideas.

·        Collaboratively plan and perform simple dramatizations.

III. HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXT

Students learn about different kinds of artists and forms of drama from various cultures. Through these activities, they:

1.      Iearn that drama comes from everyday life,

2.      understand that different drama communicates different ideas and feelings,

3.      find similarities and differences in stories and poems from at least two cultures represented in their classroom.

IV. AESTHETIC VALUING

Students reflect on their experiences with drama.  They view illustrations of stories, recite rhymes together and act out parts of songs and stories.  They talk about:

1.      what they liked about performances they have seen and why,

2.      the way voice, body movement, and facial expression enhance stories, rhymes and songs,

3.      how stories, poems, and rhymes make them feel.

V. CONNECTIONS, RELATIONS, APPLICATIONS

Understanding relationships between the arts and with disciplines outside of the arts.

Students can connect, relate, and apply various types of arts knowledge and skills within the art form, across the arts disciplines (dance, music, theatre and visual arts), and with disciplines outside of the arts.