Arts Education
Over the last three years, through work with an integrated arts education program, BRAINY (Bringing Arts Integration to Youth) Abby has developed a love of teaching young artists about the use of theatre in storytelling and self-scripting. Last Fall, she also taught creative drama in Kindergarten and 1st grade classrooms in a series of classroom visits.
BRAINY
"Bringing Arts Integration to Youth" is a program funded by the Colorado State University College of Liberal Arts. With a mission to teach storytelling and self-scripting to young learners, BRAINY allows 20-40 4th and 5th grade students from Title I schools to come to the University Center for the Arts for a day. While there, the kids have four sessions: Music, Dance, Art, and Theatre. In these sessions, they learn how stories can be told using all these different mediums and how the four work together and differ from one another. Typically, the unifying factor that ties the lesson plans of the four art forms together is the current exhibit at the University Center for the Arts' Gregory Allicar Museum.
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Abby has taught in the BRAINY program for the last three years in the theatre portion of the day. This last semester, she was the theatre session coordinator.
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See the lesson plan for BRAINY's
Theatre Session, Spring 2018:
TH 324 -
Teaching Creative Drama to Children
In Teaching Creative Drama to Children, students learned theatre education theory and history, and acquired practical experience in teaching creative drama through their participation in the BRAINY program and regular classroom visits to Polaris Elementary school. Throughout this course, students specifically crafted several lesson plans complying with Colorado Department of Education standards at the time.