Teaching Artists Sarah McKinney and Lauren Zika partner with Grant Elementary School to explore the importance of tide pools as an ecosystem. Through movement-based games they are splashing right into the process of putting on an original musical called Tide Pools Are Cool! Here they practice the theatre skills of expressing emotions and ideas with the whole body.

Over 300 students from two Eureka elementary schools came to see a preview of "Shrek, The Musical" performed by Eureka High School students.  For many students, this was a first live theater experience.  Children were heard wondering about the lighting, the costumes and make up.  During the question and answer period with the director and cast, children asked dozens of questions about the musical, the live band, and theater-craft.  

Students at Alice Birney Elementary School are using their imagination and descriptive language. They have been practicing folklorico dance with Daniel Gomez. After dancing, students returned to the classroom to hear selections of music from Mexico. They were then asked to explain what they saw in their heads while listening to music.  Several third graders shared the following:

• "There was a tornado and I was in a satellite seeing people having a good time."
• "Wild horses were prancing."
• "People partnering up.  There were older and younger people."
• "The buildings were bad and had bruises but the people were singing to make it better."
• "A family inside a house was dancing."
• "A huge field with yellow flowers and grass with chairs and an audience with 8 girls dancing.  They formed a heart and there were guys with guitars playing."
• "A group of old men with leathery faces and shirts with red stitching were riding horses." 

One of our favorite arts integration projects is symbolic portraiture.  Besides teaching the valuable lesson that "people are much more than what they look like", these symboliic portraits are a way to encourage higher order thinking as students represent book characters as animals or objects.  The text in the background is quoted from the book and is evidence of their symbolism.  

Click here to see a video about this project.   

Eureka High School's wood shop program is partnering with North Coast Arts Integration Project to create rehearsal cubes for Zane Middle School's Drama program.   Not only are Dylan and Leobardo, the woodworking students at EHS, learning valuable skills while they make these cubes, they are giving back to the community and the middle school that many EHS students attended.

As this article says, "[Rehearsal cubes] are used as stand-in props to help block out or act out a scene. There are endless combinations and with a little imagination, they go a long way. Stack up two cubes for a table. Use one as a chair. Put three of them together on the floor to make a bed. Turn one up so the open end is facing the audience to act as a TV set or cupboard. Use them as podiums or soapboxes to stand on. Stack three, two, then one to make a staircase or represent mountains. The possibilities are limitless."  Built with an open end they double as storage containers between shows.  

Click here for directions and plans to make rehearsal cubes.

Students in several K-3 classes at Lafayette Elementary learned how objects in the far distance are lighter than objects that are closer.  This phenomenon is know as "atmospheric perspective".  These students also practiced mixing secondary colors and tints.  

"We overlapped our green paint for hills and mountains.  Overlap means to make something look behind something like depth. But really it's just on the same paper.  When we mixed yellow and blue, we got green.  Then we added a tint (tint is a small dose of white) to make it lighter.  We added more blue to make it darker so we made its value change." - Third Grade Student

Students in Ms. Brakeman's 5th grade class explored chalk pastels, overlapping shapes and value in this lesson.  By overlapping organic or geometric shapes, students learned how new shapes are created.  Many students were surprised how challenging the chalk or charcoal medium was to work with.  

Michael Dayvid, a singer and songwriter based in Arcata, performed at Hoopa Elementary School. ​He has many popular songs in his repertoire from which the school requested their favorites. 

Mr. Dayvid arrived with lyric books so the whole community could sing along.

The Hoopa Elementary Rock Band joined Michael Dayvid for "One Love" by Bob Marley and "The Lazy Song" by Bruno Marrs. 

Thanks to music teacher Mr. Doiron who started preparing the student musicians for this collaboration back in December.

Students in Mr. Weiderman's 8th grade art class are making masks for the annual theatrical production.  This year's masks use the commedia dell'arte mask archetypes that students will wear during the original dramatization created in collaboration with the Amazing Vox staff.  After learning the commedia characters, students sketched a character they wanted to create and made a clay version of the character.  The students are pictured below adding the plaster gauze to the clay.   Later they will be pulling off the plaster and painting/ finishing the masks.