Artmaking
Toolkit

Tableau is a tool that gets students exploring topics, stories, characters, themes, and more with their bodies and voices before delving into the content. You can use tableaux in the classroom as both an artistic exploration and a bridge to academic content.

This strategy divides the spotlight, so student actors who are performing a tableau aren’t responsible for brainstorming dialogue on the spot, instead the audience is called on to generate dialogue for them. In this activity ML students aren’t asked to produce language at the same time they’re taking a risk by performing for their peers.

Support Students with learning the Element of Dance - Shapes. Students use creativity to create shapes and collaborate to combine those shapes. The goal is to set a positive and safe environment for students to express ideas, which then leads to building their collaboration skills.

These visuals illustrate Shapes & Levels with photos of dancers in various dance poses that are clearly labeled with the dance vocabulary they are demonstrating. These visuals help to reinforce vocabulary that may be new for most students.

Story Dice are a tool for story building. They playfully provide a structure within which students imagine and create their own stories. Rather than creating a story from thin air, students work with a set of given circumstances – characters, setting and a type of conflict – and then make creative choices about the story they’re going to tell.

The Story Building Worksheet and Outline are graphic organizers to help structure students' creative process as they brainstorm and develop story ideas for original theater scenes.

Using a storyboard gives students a way to organize their ideas and map out their story. Encourage students to draw and write text on their storyboard. Using multiple modalities of drawing and writing helps MLs participate fully, in addition to capturing students’ visual ideas more vividly than words alone might.

This worksheet gives students a structured format for writing their first scene. It is a scaffolding tool for students new to this type of writing. Identifying an action for each actor helps students develop appropriate dialogue that drives the story forward.

Students are introduced to the Elements of Dance through a “Tool Box” of foundational dance elements, concepts and movements. The Dancer’s Tool Box makes the building blocks of dance visible to students as they acquire a new physical and verbal vocabulary in dance.

This worksheet helps MLs to get started with the process of writing a script for a movie or play. It breaks down the steps of creating exposition and conflict and explains relevant vocabulary.

This is a checklist for students creating original films. It gives definitions of terms commonly used in theater and film and gives students concrete structure for organizing their work

Our Bridges program has a multitude of activities that teach the arts, literacy & SEL together.

Through this protocol we talk about students’ work in rich detail, without judgment. As we engage in conversation, they gain confidence in their own artistic voice, while building their language and observation skills.

A model program for integrating dance and social studies.