YOUR MOVE, MY MOVE! - Team building and trust for middle and high school  The key to successful dance improvisation is commitment, risk-taking and going places that you have never gone before. Using familiar pedestrian movement such as walking, rolling, running, skipping, sliding, leaping, crawling and stillness students practice sharing, taking turns, patience, acceptance, willingness to step aside, willingness to step in, knowing when to stop and when to begin again. Students learn to lead and to follow, to imitate and adapt, to give and to take, to sense the mood, to change direction, initiate and focus.  In group discussion students reflect on their group dance improvisations and come to understand the deeper meanings of the process they are experiencing.            DANCING VERBS, SIMILES, POETRY AND ME (creative movement, literacy) grades 1- 4 Using verbs, adverbs and similes as a basis for exploring movement, students create dances and poetry.  Students perform their work for one another and respond to what they see.  Poetry and movement combine beautifully as a means of self expression. Students learn that many different dances can be made to express one poem and more than one poem can be written to describe a dance.  A poem sample from a second grade classroom: "Swirling loosely like kites in the air, dancers dart and glide from here to there, rising and falling, they spin everywhere."	KNOWLEDGE ALIVE!  Slavery, Freedom and the Underground Rail Road- Grade 4 A twelve session arts integration using drama/storytelling/social studies/language arts. PART I - INTERACTIVE STORYTELLING PERFORMANCES engage students in the topic of justice through a lens examining the binary opposites of slavery versus freedom. Students learn about the African slave trade, colonial life on Long Island and the Underground Rail Road as they follow the lives of two African children captured into slavery in 1750.  The two characters grow into adulthood, they gain their freedom and with their Abolitionist friends run stations on the Underground Rail Road.  Part II - PUTTING ON A PLAY Students learn to read a script out loud, sing Underground Rail Road songs, drum and dance as they act out the play Escape to Freedom using props and costumes both in the classroom and on stage.
STORIES ONE GENERATION TELLS ANOTHER Many children today do not have the benefit of experiencing valuable relationships with senior citizens living in or near their immediate family. This intergenerational storytelling project offers students the opportunity to develop a close connection with senior citizens. Students are led through the process of learning how to ask questions that will mine the memories of seniors for the "golden nuggets" of experience they possess. Seniors have the opportunity to think about and pass on a legacy of valuable life lessons to grandchildren in the community who are not neccessarily their own. An effort is made to interview senior citizens from diverse cultural backgrounds and walks of life, nurturing a global perspective necessary for the twenty first century. The Teaching Artist helps students create dramatic vignettes with dialogue using improvisation. The culmination of this project is a performance of these life vignettes for the senior citizens. This project develops student literacy, social studies and interpersonal communication skills combined with learning skills in theatre, pantomime and storytelling.	BECOMING A CLASSROOM COMMUNITY: HOW TO BE A GOOD FRIEND OR NOT Filling a need expressed by classroom teachers for support in finding ways to help students understand how to form good mutually satisfying relationships we posed three questions: What does it mean to be a good friend?  How can dance making be used as a friendship building tool?" How can we use dance to create a sense of classroom community?  A ten session dance residency developed for grades 2 and 3 offering exciting opportunities for students to use creative dance and poetry focused on friendship to develop sensitivity to language and the feelings behind it and awareness of the power of movement to express emotion.  Students make dances, write their own poetry and do visual art work to process what they are learning.   Friendship poem titles we use are: I CAN; MEAN WORDS; WITH A FRIEND; KICK A LITTLE STONE; FIRST DAY NEW SCHOOL; HAND HOLDING; and CELEBRATION.
TELL ME A STORY, DANCE ME A DANCE  (creative movement, storytelling) k-4 How are elements of a good literacy lesson integrated into a good dance lesson? Base the dance lesson on good literature, appropriately chosen for the age group, whose imagery inspires movement. Students learn to use shape, dynamics, gestures and whole body movement to express themselves telling movement stories that have a beginning, middle and end. They discover that dance movement is a language too!	DANCING BRAINS IN ACTION - (creative movement/science) pre-K through grade 3, special education How can we use developmental movement patterns to dance in ways that feel like sea creatures, land animals, flying birds and also feel innately like ourselves?  Using movement pattern from experiential anatomy as a dance form, students wriggle, creep, crawl, roll, walk, hop, gallop, skip, run and soar as they pretend to be jellyfish, starfish, clams, snakes, crabs, lizards, monkeys and birds both large and small. Stories and evocative music are used to help them get there.