Learning Through the Arts

by Dale Ho

I'm always on the lookout for new and innovative ways to engage students. By doing so it enables us to reach a range of learning styles, interests, needs and capabilities of every child.

"A child that is engaged will learn and an educated child is an empowered child."

One of my favourite ways to do so is teaching literacy through the arts. There's music and movement, poetry, mixed media, photography, dance and film. We can get even more creative and extend this learning to introduce the arts from different cultures around the world.

For example, when teaching the culinary arts we can incorporate science, math, literacy, health and nutrition into any lesson, and how about including a history lesson or two using a popular dish from a different culture.

I think teaching literacy through film has to be one of my new favourites...it opens up a whole new world!

Through quality film children are still able to analyze characters, plots and themes, predict, make inferences, summarize, conclude and more, just as they would with a book. We can further extend learning through film to introduce production and technology.

When teaching literacy through the arts we are still able to meet the needs of varying age ranges and capabilities, possibly engaging audiences otherwise hard to reach.

By simply providing a variety of options to choose from based on interests, leads to increased engagement, achievement and increased self-confidence and self-esteem.