The Wisconsin Schools Celebrate the Wisconsin Arts Board’s 50th Anniversary project will help teachers and students find their voices and join voices with creatives across the state. The project was created in collaboration between the Wisconsin Arts Board and the DPI’s Creativity and Arts Consultant Chris Gleason, whose enthusiasm and hard work brought it to life.
The hope is to have educators and students throughout the state engaging with the same themes through exploration of a poem commissioned specifically for this project. The themes and lessons of this project create intentional connections between poetry, spoken word, music, dance, theater, visual art, and media art demonstrate this crucial through line: Creativity is a vital human capacity that we must continue to nurture in our students and each other.
Consider these lesson plans an open door.
For you: to engage with content that is exciting, new, and rooted in the riches in Wisconsin arts and creative thinking. Whether you take one of the lesson plans and implement it 1:1, or whether you’re inspired by the approach to thinking and learning and use it as a method to enrich your own classroom. Or even to collaborate with colleagues across areas of expertise.
For students: these lessons are an opportunity to broaden their experience with arts and creativity. To know not just that arts are important, but that the arts are alive in their communities – arts are alive in the poets and dancers and visual artists, but that the arts are alive in them, too. Our students are also Wisconsin’s poets, dancers, musicians, and creative thinkers.
The hope is that as you and your students explore these lessons, you will share your and your students' creations with us. Those artifacts will then fuel even more creativity. Artifacts, stories, reflections -- we want to see, hear, and experience them! Send whatever you've got to christopher.gleason@dpi.wi.gov!
Explore the Wisconsin Schools Celebrate the WAB 50th Anniversary Project here: