What happens when music, theater, dance, and the visual arts are combined? Everyone is an active learner! Show how your school’s talented artists can work together to erase the quiet.

• 1.

  How do you learn and express your ideas and feelings best? In music? Visual arts? Drama? Dance? Or all of them? Just think what wonderful things you and your classmates could accomplish, for example, if you combined your talents to do a puppet show, musical production, or held an Arts & Cultures Night!

• 2.

  With a small group, use your imaginations to find ways to erase the quiet—and increase the learning possibilities—in your school. Using Crayola® Erasable Colored Pencils, make a list of your ideas to combine talents in chorus, band, dance, orchestra, art, and drama.

• 3.

  Now find a colorful, compelling way to tell other people about your ideas. Use Erasable Colored Pencils on white paper to get your message across. You might start with a bold border. Erase some of the color to create special effects, either with white space or by filling in with another color.

• 4.

  Portray your ideas in bright colors and with active words. To add details and highlights, simply erase sections of color. Are you ready to carry through with your ideas by working with other students and adult leaders in your school? Make it happen!

Standards

• LA: Read with sufficient accuracy and fluency to support comprehension.
• LA: Write informative/explanatory texts to examine a topic and convey ideas, concepts, and information through the selection, organization, and analysis of relevant content.
• LA: Demonstrate command of the conventions of standard English capitalization, punctuation, and spelling when writing.
• LA: Engage effectively in a range of collaborative discussions with diverse partners on grade level topics, texts, and issues, building on others' ideas and expressing one's own clearly.
• SS: Describe ways in which language, stories, folktales, music, and artistic creations serve as expressions of culture and influence behavior of people living in a particular culture.
• SS: Describe how people create places that reflect ideas, personality, culture, and wants and needs as they design homes, playgrounds, classrooms, and the like.
• SS: Show how groups and institutions work to meet individual needs and promote the common good, and identify examples of where they fail to do so.
• VA: Use different media, techniques, and processes to communicate ideas, experiences, and stories.
• VA: Use visual structures of art to communicate ideas.

Adaptations

• In small groups, students discuss a typical day at school. Have them list a daily schedule and what they do during their school time. Encourage students to brainstorm where they can find the arts in their studies. For example, in the Tewa language, there is not word for "art" because creativity is interwoven with work, ideas, and expression of those ideas. Baking bread, chopping wood, or making pottery are all considered art!
• In math class, encourage small groups of students to write rap songs for math problems. In social studies, students can rap about the capitals of states or countries. In science, students create a 3-D science project.
• Students compose and perform original plays in their home language and another language that they are currently studying.