Arts Integration: Up North at the Cabin

On Tuesday, we started an arts integration project in which we explored descriptive language in the beautifully written book, Up North at the Cabin.

Students worked in small groups to select sentences from the text that used interesting descriptions and/or comparisons.  Then, all groups brought their selections to the rug and shared one sentence which I recorded on chart paper.  We decided on the following sentences:

"The houses are made from logs that look like shiny pretzels."

"I am a smart angler… I bait my hook with peanut-butter-and-worm sandwiches."

"We can all watch the loons dance down the sun."

"I am a great gray dolphin.  The lake is my ocean."

"Rising in a sea of air-bubble balloons, I float on a carpet of waves."

"Like a house on stilts, a bull moose stands in the shallows."

"When I’m far away from summer… I close my eyes 
and once again, I am up north at the cabin."

Next, we began the challenging work of choosing creative movements that would best represent each sentence.  We put all of our movements together and it was exciting to see how it looked as one longer piece.  It was interesting to perform our movement phrase to two different types of music.  Students felt that one piece of music best fit our "dance".  Afterwards, students reflected on the movements and choices they had made throughout the process.  We also discussed some goals for the future, such as working on performing movements in unison.

On Thursday, we performed our movement phrase again and then started to create cray-pas illustrations of our favorite sentences from the text.  Students are making great choices about how to best capture the important details from these well-written sentences.

I was so impressed with students' hard-work, creativity, and ability to take risks with their learning.