DEPARTMENT: Pre-K 4 SA
DEPARTMENT HEAD: Sarah Baray, Ph.D.
COUNCIL DISTRICTS IMPACTED: Citywide
SUBJECT:
Educational Presentation
SUMMARY:
Briefing on the Wolf Trap program aimed to provide STEM education through an integrated arts approach in an 8-week residency program to 20 Pre-K 4 SA classroom teachers.
BACKGROUND INFORMATION:
The Wolf Trap Institute is a proven national model for utilizing the performing arts to support young children's cognitive, emotional, and physical development. Wolf Trap enhances academic skills in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) content through developmentally appropriate arts-integrated professional development and coaching for teachers while providing engaging learning for children in content that is infrequently taught to young children.
Wolf Trap addresses two primary concerns:
* The school readiness of children, especially for children living in poverty, and
* Access to effective professional development and coaching for teachers who work with these children.
The Wolf Trap Institute's art-based teaching method taps into children's innate desire for active, multisensory learning and utilizes these methods to teach challenging content.
A recent independent study funded by the US Department of Education and conducted in Fairfax County, Virginia indicates that teachers who use the Wolf Trap Institute's arts-integrated early childhood strategies had a significant, positive impact on children's learning in math. Additionally, a new analysis released in 2016 shows that student's in the classrooms of Wolf Trap-trained teachers gain the equivalent of more than a month of additional math learning. Participating teachers also developed skill-sets to engage students in performing arts learning experiences (music, dance, drama) that develop early childhood mathematics learning skills in number and number sense, measurement, geometry, algebra, data analysis, statistics, and probability. Students in the...
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