Arts in Academics Grants 2007

Projects selected for Arts in Academics funding for 2007 are:

• Agnes B. Hennessey Elementary School, East Providence, $525, for the "Detective Night" project for second, third, and fourth graders and their parents. The evening will include several different activity stations, such as "Scientific Drawing," where students will draw pictures of insects while learning about insect body parts, size, and proportion and "Who Done It? Math Haiku," where students will solve riddles based on math term clues in the poem.


• Block Island School, $400, for the school's production of "Green Eggs and Hamlet." The play, about issues of self-esteem and social interaction, will be written in part and performed by the K-6 students, helping them develop the skills of self-expression and coherent thought for writing successfully.


• Broad Rock Middle School, Wakefield, $575, for the Special Event Family Platter history project. As part of a social studies unit on immigration, eighth grade students and their families will be invited to create a keepsake ceramic platter that incorporates their own family history. The platters will be decorated with images and symbols that relate to each family's history and nationality and can be used at family celebrations and holidays.


• International Charter School, Pawtucket, $500, to support the "Book of the Dead: Making Ancient Egypt Come Alive" project. Fourth grade students studying Ancient Egypt in social studies classes will be able to create a "Book of the Dead," using pictures, symbols, and hieroglyphics to tell their own life story.


• Martin Middle School, East Providence, $500, for the musical Mathecal (Math Through the Ages and Disciplines). Sixth, seventh, and eighth graders will assist with the playwriting process, the creation of costumes and set, and will perform in the musical, while integrating information acquired in all core subjects with an emphasis on math concepts.

Arts In Academic Grants 2006

Projects selected for Arts in Academics funding for 2006 are:

• North Smithfield High School, $850, for the “Obras Vivientes” (“Living Works”) project which will allow students in the Honors Spanish IV and Honors French IV classes to research the works of Spanish, Hispanic and French painters and then “bring them to life” by creating a background that includes elements of the original work, illustrating the work through music, movement, and dance, and providing a bilingual narration of their projects.
  


• Agnes E. Little Elementary School, Pawtucket, $675, to support the “Shades of Aboriginal Music” project and specifically to enable third grade students to construct rain sticks and boom pipes. These musical instruments, constructed from such materials as PVC, wood, mailing tubes, and beads, will teach the students math skills and concepts of sound, such as wavelength and frequency, that are part of the science curriculum.


• Burrillville High School, $675 to support the school garden project of the landscape design class and specifically for decorative clay tiles or mosaics. For the project, English classes at the school will research poetry that reflects on nature. Landscape design students then will incorporate the poems into decorative design elements on tiles and create tile walkways and/or line walls within the garden.

Arts In Academics Fund Grants 2005

Inaugural Arts in Academics Projects

• Scituate High School, $1,000, toward the establishment of the Scituate Middle/High School Nature Lab, a permanent collection of preserved biological and geological specimens that will be studied by science and art students. Through the project, students in the advanced senior-level biology class will travel with sixth grade art students to collect seaweed samples which later will be preserved with assistance from a local artist/scientist and a naturalist.
  


• William R. Dutemple Elementary School, Cranston, $750, toward the design, construction, and installation of a labyrinth of grass and concrete paving stones in the school’s front lawn. While fifth grade students, with the help of a landscape architect, will create the labyrinth, each student in the K-5 school will paint a stone. The project will require students to use mathematics while also integrating social studies through the study of labyrinths in past cultures.
  


• North Smithfield Junior/Senior High School, $250, for a trip to the Rhode Island School of Design for students in the French III and IV classes and for the construction of a timeline mural of French history by students in the French IV class. In the proposal, French teacher Linda Milner captures the essence of the Arts in Academics goal: “By integrating art projects with what the students are learning, I have found they are able to develop an emotional attachment to what they are studying. As a result, they care more about what it is they are learning, they become more engaged in the learning process, and they learn more.”