Arts Integration Essay

With today’s rapid growth in science and technology, countries around the globe are working to make their people the best and brightest. At one time in our country’s history it was the rule for students to focus on the three R’s, reading, writing and arithmetic. Music lessons were a necessary extra only for the affluent who could afford them though it was a pleasurable pastime for all people. Eventually public education valued music enough to make it a required element in all public schools. Today we are seeing school systems electing to drop music education from their curriculum. They are under financial pressure to do more to fund science, technology, and math, programs and elect to pull funding from the arts. State and federal funding
This is where Arts Integration comes in. Arts Integration is an approach to teaching that considers how student learn. “The Kennedy Center ArtsEdge Education Network defines arts integration as an approach to teaching in which students construct and demonstrate understanding through an art form.” (7) Arts Integration is a hands-on, cross curricular way of teaching. Any art form can be combined with any core subject area at any grade level but cooperative teacher planning is a necessity. An example of music and a core subjects being taught through the Arts Integration approach uses storytelling from language arts and the musical work of “Peter and the Wolf” by Sergey Prokofiev. Students could read the story, listen to the music and write a similar style story and pair that story with another musical selection. They could also identify the pairing of instruments to the character and explain why they believe the instrument and character go together. There are many creative ways to utilize this cross curricular method. Arts integration is a creative way for teachers to bring the benefits of music and other art forms to the teaching of core