Grades: Pre-K and Kindergarten Price: In-person sessions: $25 per session Virtual sessions: Pay what you can Curriculum Connections: Language Arts/Literacy, Social & Emotional Development, S.T.E.M., Visual & Performing Arts
Classrooms are transformed with performing arts experiences that inspire new ways of thinking and learning. In this embedded professional development program, NJPAC teaching artists work directly with teachers to develop and implement arts-integrated lessons that engage children in active, joyful learning across subject areas, including literacy and S.T.E.M.
In-person classes
Thursday, April 13
Session 1 | 9AM-12PM
Spectacular Vernacular: Enriching Vocabulary with Arts Strategies with Paige Hernandez, DC/MD/VA Wolf Trap Master Teaching Artist
Discover engaging ways to enhance your students’ vocabulary! Participants will get first-hand experience using arts strategies that include hip hop, sign language, and theater games! Creating rich vocabulary learning opportunities doesn’t have to be a daunting task when you rediscover language and literacy skills and give them an interesting twist. Use slang, #hashtags, technology, and more!
Session 2 | 1-4PM
Keep It Moving: Using the Arts and Personal Touches for Smooth Transitions and Smart Classroom Management with Paige Hernandez, DC/MD/VA Wolf Trap Master Teaching Artist Explore creative ways to facilitate transitions, establish routines, and enhance daily practices using arts strategies that include dance, poetry, hip hop, and sign language! Participate in and analyze a lesson, with step-by-step examination of structure, transitions, and easy solutions for common class challenges. Participants will create and enhance strategies with their own personal flair, culture and expertise!
Looking for Musical Clues: Uncovering the Hidden Music in Favorite Stories (Pre-K, K) with Christina Farrell, DC/MD/VA Wolf Trap Master Teaching Artist Learn to uncover the hidden music in favorite stories! Explore arts strategies for adapting text from a book to include musical elements, and practice simple techniques for using rhythm and melody to engage young children in storytelling. Create a child-led musical experience based on favorite story!
Session 2 | 12:30-2PM
Arts in the Natural World: Exploring Science through Dance (Pre-K, K) with Amanda Whiteman, DC/MD/VA Wolf Trap Master Teaching Artist Learn how props, children’s literature, and the elements of dance can be used together to facilitate creative and sensory experiences that ignite children’s imagination and understanding of the environment, nature, and scientific inquiry.
Paige Hernandez is a multidisciplinary artist who is critically acclaimed as a performer, director, choreographer and playwright. As an AEA equity actress, Paige has performed on many stages throughout the country. As a playwright, Paige has been commissioned by the National New Play Network, the Smithsonian’s Discovery Theatre, The Kennedy Center and the Glimmerglass Festival. She recently received an Individual Artist Award from the Maryland State Arts Council as well as two Helen Hayes nominations for choreography and performance. Paige has also been named a “classroom hero” by The Huffington Post, a “Citizen Artist Fellow” with the Kennedy Center and a “Rising Leader of Color” by TCG. With her company B-FLY ENTERTAINMENT, Paige continues to develop and tour original work internationally. www.paigehernandez.com
Christina Farrell
Christina Farrell
Teaching Artist
Christina Farrell’s extensive experience as a Teaching Artist includes classroom residencies and professional development for Gateway to the Arts Aesthetic Education Institute and the Western Pennsylvania Wolf Trap Institute for Early Learning in the Arts. She is the Founding Director of Opera Ignite, a company dedicated to creative education through music, drama and movement. Through Opera Ignite, she conducts classroom residencies, professional development for teachers and audience engagement workshops. She is also the Educational Director for Prime Stage Theatre which promotes literacy skills to reluctant adolescent readers through theater-based experiences. Her professional development workshops have been featured at various Pennsylvania Music Educators Association Conferences, the 2010 Pittsburgh Association for the Education of Young Children Conference and the 2011 Conference on Eugene O’Neill in association with New York University.
She was chosen as the 2007 Gateway to the Arts Hardie Artist of the Year in recognition of her outstanding commitment to arts education and is a recipient of the 2011 Fred Rogers Memorial Scholarship. Christina received her BFA in Vocal Performance from Carnegie Mellon University and MA in Educational Theatre from New York University. She has performed with Washington National Opera, Baltimore’s Opera Vivente, Opera Theater of Pittsburgh, Westmoreland Symphony Orchestra and at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts as a Finalist with the National Symphony Orchestra’s Young Soloists’ Competition. She has served on the voice faculties of The Peabody Preparatory in Baltimore and The Levine School of Music in Washington, D.C., and taught six years as a middle school music teacher.
Amanda Whiteman
Amanda Whiteman
Teaching Artist
Amanda Layton Whiteman has been working for Wolf Trap as a Master Teaching Artist since 2005, providing professional development workshops and classroom residencies all over the country, integrating the performing arts with literacy, math, and science. In conjunction with Wolf Trap, she developed and received a math focused research grant from the U.S. Department of Education, evaluating STEM teaching through the performing arts. In November 2013, Amanda presented the keynote address with her Wolf Trap colleagues at the National Association for the Education of Young Children conference in Washington, DC. Amanda has also presented nationally for Wolf Trap about the connections between dance and nature.
Amanda has been choreographing and teaching dance in Northern Virginia since 1998 in schools and community organizations such as Creative Cauldron, Reston’s Young Actor’s Theatre program and several area dance companies. In 2008, after years of working with young dancers in the community, Amanda founded GroundShare Arts Alliance as a way to bring together her work with students and professional dance artists. As artistic director, choreographer and playwright, Amanda’s work with GroundShare strives to develop meaningful, artistic experiences for students and professional artists through collaboration and community building. Amanda holds a BFA in Dance and a BA in Integrated Studies with a specialization in Dance Therapy from George Mason University.