As we are finishing up field, I have realized that my cooperating teacher does not use the arts at all with the exception of her students attending music class once a week for half an hour. It makes it more fun to teach with the arts and has multiple benefits for the students. Just seeing the reaction of the students and their excitement made me realize the arts are such an incredible tool and I definately will benefit myself as a teacher and my students by using them. Now I need to continue using the arts in my lessons as often as possible. He loved the process drama activity so I was really excited about that! Overall, it went very well! Our Supervisor sat in on this lesson and discussed with us afterward how awesome it was. It helped get their 'wiggles' out and catch their attention from the beginning. It was also a great hook to begin our lesson with. It got them up moving and involved and allowed their creative problem solving skills to work because they were able to envision how life was in their own minds and I'm sure no student pictured it the exact same way. They were able to understand the main ideas from each part of life on the colonies through this simple activity. On the Frontier, they were the candle in the window of a log cabin home watching a family go about their hard days work. On Plantations, they were the sail of a ship bringing slaves to the plantation and they were able to view what was happening on the plantation.

In towns & cities they were the steeple of the church looking out onto the everyday life in the town. We used their social studies textbook as our resource and had the students stand up and participate as certain objects in the the three different lifestyles of the Colonies.

We taught about Life in the Colonies and how there were three different kinds of life (Towns & Cities, Plantations, Frontier).

'Speaking Objects' was a very effective way to get the students to understand the topic we needed them to understand. Out of our 5 lessons we taught, the ones that incorporated the arts were much more meaningful to our students and definitely more fun to teach! So it was obvious to us through the lessons in which we integrated the arts how important they really are. The students were extremely involved in these lessons, had fantastic behavior during the arts parts of our lessons, and were able to recall the information taught with the arts very quickly. Their memory was much sharper and they could recall information from the Speaking Objects activity to help them create a poster on one part of life in each Colony. Speaking Objects was the activity we did with our students and it was awesome to see them use the process drama activity for their group activity that followed. For our second lesson on life in the colonies, we used process drama. The students really got into the singing in a round and tapping out the rhythm and beat. We were able to use ideas from the music presentation we gave in creative arts and incorporate that into our lesson which was so helpful. For our first lesson on the 13 Colonies we wrote a song to the tune of Yankee Doodle. We integrated music and drama into two of our lessons and it went very well. Integrating the arts had a huge impact on our students.

Usoe songbook