6-8 Middle School |

Designing Student-Centered Curriculum

How can we better integrate our students’ interests, ideas, and needs when we develop arts curriculum? When and where can we encourage them to take the wheel and drive their own learning (without sacrificing depth or discipline)? explore ways to activate and increase student voice, choice, and leadership engage in hands-on practice with Responding and Connecting strategies…

The Music Box: A Project Based Learning Activity

A great introductory project that is based on student interests. Can be modified easily to work in any subject, and incorporates numeracy, budgeting, and other math skills. This open-ended idea has students creating monthly “loot crates” based around a central theme (music in this case) and then they have to create a budget figuring out…

Student Podcasts are LIVE! (and how I published them)

Our podcasts are now LIVE on Spotify! Listen now to these amazing student created projects. The topics you ask? Anything from Unusual Foods to the Secret Lives of Pets. If you ever wanted to know more about the first-ever male Cover Girl ambassador James Charles we got you covered! Worried about Surviving a Zombie Apocalypse?…

8-bit Music: Original Compositions

We take a look at the history of video game music and how it was made. There is a surprisingly robust history around this topic, spanning from it’s origins to its influence on popular music today. The limitations of the early hardware meant it had to be composed in 3 or 4 tracks making it…

Podcasting: Content & Themes

As part of middle school electives I am currently running a course on podcasting. Beyond the technical proficiency required, the most important part of podcasting would be content. Generating topic, ideas, and themes is essential. We spent the last few periods running through the gamut of brainstorming activities to think of what is important to not just the audience, but…

Setting Norms: A Social Contract

Start your year with a Social Contract. Different from a set of classroom rules, a contract is an agreement created by the students for both how they want to be treated and how they should treat others. Establish a culture that is unique to your classroom, based on the values of those in it.

K-pop Listening Lesson

K-pop (abbreviation of Korean popular music or Korean pop; (케이팝) is a music genre originating in South Korea, characterized by a wide variety of audio-visual elements. Although it includes all genres of “popular music” within South Korea, the term is often used in a narrower sense to describe a modern form of South Korean pop music (kpop) drawing inspiration from…

A&GC: Final Project – Art Ambassadors

The final project of our Arts as a Path to Global Citizenship course was a community based one entitled: Art Ambassadors.” The project involved students learning about both an art form from another country or culture as well as the country itself, then presenting and teaching it to another younger grade in the school. Initially met…

AG&C: Week 6/7 – Discussion Groups

Wrapping up the Graphic Novel unit we had a lot to celebrate and a lot to reflect on. It was really a new experience for me as a teacher as I had never ran such in depth lit-circles before. The students all enjoyed the novels immensely but the discussion and reflection pieces left me wanting more. Luckily,…

AG&C: Week 4/5 – Graphic Novels

We’re finally ready to move in to the focus project of the course: Empathy & Global Citizenship through Graphic Novels. Students have split into their four different lit circles and are reading through their respective texts, filling out discussion prompts along the way. At first incredibly enthused, I now feel the steam has…