INSPIRE YOUR HEART WITH ART DAY

Always celebrated on January 31st, Inspire Your Heart With Art Day is a day to ponder how art effects your heart. Art is valued and appreciated for all sorts of reasons. This Day’s title does suggest that you inspire “your” heart, however, you may also use it to inspire another person’s heart.

You may choose to admire a beautiful masterpiece, go to a special concert, dance, paint, take photographs, create a sculpture, visit a museum or any of the thousands of forms of art.  

Our area was home to the Humboldt County Region 1 Regional Arts Forum today and it was a great success.  Jane Hill provided a thoughtful reflection on her career in education as well as her work with the Eureka Symphony and Dell'Arte International.  Bob Bullwinkel gave a whirlwind tour of arts integration techniques and a demonstration unit on ancient Greece.  

Lunch was provided by the Arcata High Culinary Class and entertainment by the Fortuna High School Camarada Singers.  Six breakout sessions were offered and the one that Heather and Bill presented was attended by a large percentage of the participants.  We presented four visual thinking strategies and out presentation can be found here.  A second breakout session offered more opportunities for participants to learn about music, dance, art, technology and advocacy.  

Heather returned from a week of training with the staff at FCOE and had a good impression of their "Arts Every Day" program.  We are looking into using their services for three days of the summer institute.  Their experience training hundreds of teachers in arts integration could give us a great start in the training of our teachers.  

You are receiving this email either as a principal of a school benefiting from the North Coast Arts Integration Project or because you are a potential site leader for one of these schools.  Since this is the first update email, please let us know if we have your email in error.

There are 2 important updates in this email.

1)  The January 26 Arts Forum is a great chance to see what arts integration is about and an opportunity to get the first hours of the 40 training hours required of our site leaders.  The speakers who will be at this event are terrific and Stacy Young says she still has the ability to pay for substitutes through her office.  Only 18 slots left for this forum, so register soon!

Here is the registration link. http://elearning.humboldt.k12.ca.us/?event=arts-education-regional-forum-2

2)  We are tentatively scheduling the summer institute for August 10-14.  This allows teachers the chance to enjoy their summer break right after school gets out and also have some time to prepare in their classrooms after the institute before school starts.  We hope this is a good choice of dates for everyone.  Site leaders are expected to attend all five days and the institute will probably be held at HSU.  Save the dates!

Let me know if you have any questions and thank you for your participation in this important project