Increasing student achievement, deepening engagement,
and expanding learning!

Imagine using poetry and puppets to study endangered species, or drumming and dancing your way through history! This is exactly how students in A4L's GET smART and Teacher Resource programs have fun with creative learning! The school day is the easiest place to achieve the goal of integrating art into learning. During this time, students become a captive audience, and the student/teacher relationship grows!

A4L trains teachers on how to apply art principles into the state-required core curriculum. Teachers are taught how to further motivate students with a hands-on approach and in an enjoyable manner. A4L's in-school program, from pre-K to 12th grade, increases student achievement, deepens engagement, and expands learning as partnership between the teacher, parent and community by integrating the arts. These goals are based on research proving that learning occurs only when a student is engaged and has a strong sense of community.

The history and process of art-making engages students in inquiry, knowledge acquisition, critical thinking and problem solving. When delivered effectively, these teaching methods inspire students' desire to learn and, as a result, help students build literacy, math and science skills, and acquire knowledge of history, geography, and current events.

Early GET smART Programs

Connecting young children of all abilities to a healthy start in learning!

Remember when you first learned to love books, colors, shapes, and sounds? This time is usually traced to a moment when you were engaged in play. Young children (and adults!) learn this way and Arts for Learning integrates visual art, dramatic play, creative movement and music into the early childhood classroom to promote sensory, cognitive, and social development in Miami's youngest children.

Early Childhood Programs

In 2005, Arts for Learning and VSA arts of Florida partnered to develop an arts-based program to support literacy and school readiness for pre-school children in Miami-Dade County. Using the Start with the Arts resource book created by VSA arts, Arts for learning provides professional development workshops for early childhood educators to teach them how to connect the arts to story time. To support teachers beyond the training workshops, Arts for Learning offers each of the participating pre-schools resident teaching artists. The teaching artists lead students in activities, support the teachers in the development of their own arts-integrated lesson and become a resource and partner for the entire school.

Families First

Arts for Learning's early childhood program provides participating centers with family day events based on the Start with the Arts at Home resource book for parents. During family days, parents and their children are lead through arts activities that can be done at home to support literacy and school readiness. The activities are demonstrated by an Arts for Learning teaching artist. It is an event filled with fun, food and fabulous resources for parents.

GET smART

GET smART is a professional training program for teachers to help them infuse the arts into the state-required core curriculum. It is the goal of Arts for Learning to increase the number of both schools and teachers using arts-integration strategies to improve school quality and student performance.

GET smART provides teachers:

"Over 90% of teachers participating in GET smART reported improved student engagement in academics." — Evaluation by Birnie & Associates, September 2004.

Sample: GET smART Program at North Hialeah Elementary

Third, 4th, and 5th grade students at North Hialeah Elementary studied environmental issues including water conservation and endangered species. As part of their lessons, they illustrated the water cycle and created animal habitats, wrote Cinquain poems and worked with local artist Pablo Cano to build puppets of endangered species for a culminating theatrical presentation of the learning unit. To prepare for the culminating event, students read literature, wrote scripts, and designed sets which included an aqueduct.

"I've never been so proud of these students! Will we be doing this again next year?" — Principal John Schoeck

The North Hialeah Elementary program specifically connected to classroom curriculum in the following ways:

Science: The Water Cycle, Ecology
Math: Data Analysis
Social Studies: Reference and Research, Geography
Language Arts: Poetry, Literature
Theatre Arts: Communication through physical movement

Sample: GET smART Program at R.R. Moton Elementary:

Hearts of Our Community: Perrine
In the Perrine community one third grade class connected with the local senior center and interviewed local seniors to collect oral histories, and documented what they learned in an original book about Perrine. The culminating project was a gallery showcasing student work based on their research and a public reading of the book, which was attended by the seniors involved in the project. The cultural arts provider was the Historical Museum of South Florida.

Click Here for a sample from Hearts of our Community [PDF]

A4L Resource Program

The Resource Program began as an initiative between A4L and the Carnival Center for the Performing Arts. It was created to provide teachers with classroom resources that integrate the arts into the curriculum, and to help support live arts experiences in the schools.

For educators interested in an easy way to begin integrating the arts into classrooms, two thematic resource kits were created. Dancing and Drumming in the African Diaspora and Jazz in the Americas -- both which bring geography, history and language arts to life through the rhythm, dance and influence of African culture and American Jazz throughout the world.

Created from the collective creative energy of two of Miami's foremost cultural institutions, Drumming & Dancing in the African Diaspora provides a full set of resources for educators to integrate immediately. The package includes books, maps, videos and numerous percussion instruments as well as a Teachers' Guide with customizable lesson plans, recommended activities, a list of the Sunshine State Standards addressed in the program and a comprehensive list of locally-based artists and cultural organizations who can provide a live arts component.

Both kits are designed for grades 4 to 8 and can be tailored to anywhere from a few hours to a number of weeks. To make learning truly active and multi-dimensional, both programs incorporate a partnership with a local professional artist to provide interactive programs in the implementation of the program.

View Dancing/Drumming Set Video