Jon Schwartz
When I tell people I use the performing arts to teach my second grade students, they often ask, “You’re responsible for teaching kids academics. How do you find the time for that?”
Guess what? For the first 13 years of teaching, I too viewed the performing arts as an unaffordable luxury, if not a waste of precious instructional time. My job was to teach academics by filling my students with information. If the school wanted my students to sing, they’d give them more than 30 minutes a week with the district’s music teacher. We had real work to do!
Only last year, when I started bringing music into my classroom, did I realize that rather than being a diversion, the performing arts can be a tool to unify the different strands of academic learning into a cohesive theme that students can easily digest and eagerly embrace while enhancing learning. Direct and explicit instruction and standard/basal texts are still cornerstones of our class, but we’ve made time for content-rich music and other visual and performing arts. By using them as thematic teaching tools, we’re not squandering learning opportunities, we’re enhancing, enriching