What's the Matter?

By Joshua McCarry

What happens when a science teacher, a teaching artist, and an 8th grade class learn about phases of matter through dance and theater?

Ideas COLLIDE!  Imaginations EXPAND!  Particles move in different and unpredictable ways.  

Last month, I got the chance to collaborate with DISES Science teacher Mickie Flores to create an original play which follows a water particle on a dizzying adventure through matter- solid, liquid, and gas- not to mention a storm cloud, a melting icicle in New York City and a cup of hot cocoa in Alaska. 

The project, entitled What's the Matter?, integrates the arts with science to form an understanding of the molecular structure of the world around us.  Much of the work was student-led; with the class writing an original script, composing a soundtrack with DISES music teacher Beth Kyzer, and crafting a set made of Wordart.  

Visual art skills and molecules collide as the set is built for What's the Matter?

8th grade musicians at DISES worked with original scores and scripts to accompany a 

water molecule's journey through matter. 

Students demonstrate their understanding of the content using dance to explore the 

movement of liquid particles.  

8th grader Katie Hutchinson displays her artwork for the show.  

Gas molecules expand- and so does a smile!  

Encourage Creativity!

We are celebrating National Arts in Education Week at Opera House Arts! This is a time to celebrate, advocate and participate in the power that arts education has on our nation-wide learning community.  

Last week's Shakespeare Workshop at DISHS, Lend Me Your Ears, was great way to kick off another year of Arts Integration at our island schools. Visiting Artists Joshua McCarey and Meg Taintor joined ELA classes to introduce the play's plot, characters and figurative language as part of our year-long Shakespeare Immersion at OHA.  Thank you to Marion Austin, John Lincoln, Kim Larsen and participating students for making this a success. Here's to learning in and through the arts! 

Want to learn more about National Arts in Education Week? Click here!

Fragiles

A great picture surprised me when I walked into the DI-S K-8 school at 8 a.m. Friday morning to finish preparing for our show, "Sea of Birds," at the Reach Performing Arts Center: a first grade class circled around our teaching artist's lobby installation, finishing their learning from the artist's residency under the initiative and guidance of their teachers. They had collected "fragiles"--objects which they understood to be fragile, like the stories we tell each other about our lives. They were placing these fragile objects--slender forsythia branches, delicate paper objects, etc.--onto the fragile stick-and-tape structure they had created as a place from which to tell their own storytelling emerged (in the form of drawings on fragile paper, strung along the ceiling above the stick dome).

In creating these structures and teaching about and with fragile objects and spaces, Sebastienne Mundheim, our visiting artist, was giving the students a tactile, visual sense for something abstract: the fragility of our stories and memories. How are our stories fragile? In the way that "truth" is fragile: it is created amongst us, never by ourselves alone. There is our experience of something--and our memory of it, which is always slightly different from the actual experience. Then there is our telling of the memory, which shifts the experience again; and the hearing of this telling by the person or persons to whom we are telling it. Then the person to whom we told our story tells our story to others. And on the story goes into the world, each detail important to us, to our understanding of our shared world, and delicate as it is passed from mouth to ear and heart to heart.

And thus the students, placing their "fragiles" upon the delicate structure in the lobby, from which their drawings of the stories their mothers had told them emerged.

Check out the photos at our Facebook site: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=5780599838#/photo.php?pid=1905369&id=18518578665&ref=mf