Education United States Project #15151

STEM plus Arts = Learning Full STEAM ahead!

by Story Tapestries Inc.

STEM plus Arts = Learning Full STEAM ahead!

Project Report | Dec 31, 2015
What an amazing Fall for Story Tapestries

By Grace Millar | Program Coordinator

What an incredible Fall for Story Tapestries!!!! Over the last 4 months, we have completed 6 long term residencies and multiple family events in MD, DC and FL. All of the programs were supported by Story Tapestries artists, donors and grants written by the Story Tapestries' team in collaboration with other organizations. If we wrote about all of them, than this report would be incredibly long, but you can read more HERE.

Recently, we worked with all of Kent Island Elementary School's 2nd grade team. Without the Story Tapestries matching funds to support this work, it would not have happened. The PTA paid for a portion and they wrote a grant for another piece of the pie but that still was not enough. We appealed to our donors and raised enough money to spend 4 days with each classroom. It was a powerful experience for both the students, teachers, and the artist...The teacher's said that they observed during the work students who never shine, who never add their voice to a story, talking up a storm.

At the top of December, we launched a new section of our partnership with The Learning Alliance to coach teachers and early childhood center directors on how to improve the way they use multi-sensory strategies with their 0-5 year olds...On Saturday December 5th, Arianna Ross, taught the first Saturday workshop, Harnessing the Power of the Arts: Teaching Literacy, to over 60 teachers from Indian River County. We used elements of storytelling, dance, drama, visual arts and writing to increase the teacher's ability to develop their students' emergent literacy understanding, cognitive power, fine and gross motor development as well as their knowledge of the core subjects.

...Besides giving the teachers a range of strategies, we found that there was an added success, a community of early childhood educators, who now knew each other at a deeper level, spoke the same language and wanted the same results for their children.

Our goal was for the team to leave the workshop with activities to support purposeful play, help them meet their FL Gold Standards, and to develop their ability to ask open ended questions...One educator left the workshop saying that now she is planning to incorporate children's imagination into their learning by asking open ended questions. Another mentioned "I like reading, then acting out, illustrating and surmising what happens after the written word ends." The overall response to the start of this pilot program was "GREAT workshop!!"

Thank you so much for your support, please continue to advocate for us by sending this report to friends and family that would love to be part of this project too.

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