Full STEAM Ahead - Integrating Art and Math in the Library

"Creativity can be described as letting go of certainties."

 - Gail Sheey, American author and journalist

If this quote is accurate then March must be a month chock full of creativity.  Here in the Land of Enchantment March is full of standardized testing, ping ponging weather, 5th grade romances with a 48 hour life span and everyone eyeing the calendar and silently counting the days until spring break.  When uncertain March Madness is the norm what better time to hang on to innovative and creative instructional tie ins?  It's been the grounding anchor for me for sure.

 Eubank has recently become a Kennedy Center Partner school. This means that as our school works through it's redesign to become a full Fine Arts K-5 magnet school, instructors are learning with support from the Kennedy Center how to use art integration as a way to teach core standards.  Much of what students and classes have been experimenting with and working on is showcased through two different Fine Arts expos, the first, earlier this month, showcased intermediate work, the second, in April, will showcase primary grades. Because the library services all grades preschool - 5th grade the efforts in the library will be seen through both expos.  For 4th and 5th graders, the focus of our efforts has been using primary sources to study Jazz and the Harlem Renaissance; the end result which was shared in our school expo was, in my opinion, pretty amazing.

The Bee's Knees

This spring my students have been exploring the Harlem Renaissance, American Jazz and Duke Ellington.   It's been crazy good.  We've incorporated social studies, music, art and math standards into a final product that was worked on collaboratively by 6 different classes (4th - 5th grades). To bring back a Jazz-era phrase,  "it was the bee's knees!"

Throughout this study students focused on the life of Duke Ellington, the rise of Jazz during the Harlem Renaissance and what exactly jazz music is.  We listened to Ellington's greatest hits during our check out period, watched Brain Pop videos about this time period, and even practiced identifying the rhythms and sounds of specific jazz instruments.  Not to mention the pretty fantastic books we've used along the way:

Jazz on a Saturday Night  by Leo & Diane Dillon

Jazz Baby by Lisa Wheeler

This Jazz Man by Karen Ehrhardt

Duke Ellington by Andrea Davis Pinkney

Collaborative Art

As a culminating project for each class, the students worked collaboratively to create a coordinate grid portrait of Duke Ellington based on this photo:

 This was such a fun way for students to work together in the library.  If you've ever used mystery graphs with your students as a way to teach grid coordinates then you're already familiar with this idea.  An image is divided into equal pieces and then assigned specific coordinates. The picture my students used was divided into 88 equally sized pieces, 11 rows of 8.  Each row is assigned a letter in alphabetical order, and each column is assigned a number.  On the back of the image each square is labeled with it's specific coordinate.  The image is then cut apart and each square glued to an index card and labeled with it's coordinate.

Over a space of four weeks my intermediate students worked on this portrait after check out and our specific lesson for the day was finished.  Students would choose a square based on it's difficulty (I had the squares sorted by how detailed they were) and then recreate the design for a larger square I had pre-cut for them.  As squares were completed the students and I would work together to glue them to the matching coordinate on an enlarged graph I had drawn out on bulletin board paper.

A single 8.5 x 11 picture of what we're hoping to create

The paper is flipped and divided into 1 inch segments

Each segment is further divided into smaller equal sized squares and then labeled with coordinates

Cut the image into strips then individual squares

The results were pretty fantastic!

 My students and I were pretty "Jazzed" by the whole project - there was lots of learning, movement, creativity, and fun - exactly what's needed when the winds of March begin to blow!