Teacher's guide to In My Heart, I Am a Dancer
by Debora Kodish and Deborah Wei
Part Three: Lesson 2 (K-4): Folklore is another word for art
Objective: To help students understand what folklore is.
Procedure
Ask students the following questions:
- What do you think art is?
- How many kinds of arts can you name?
Break students into groups of 4 or 5 and ask them to make a chart using the following questions to guide them:
- How many kinds of art did you see today?
- What good art did you see today?
- What bad art did you see today?
- Could you improve on the art you saw in any way?
- Can you imagine some art that you would really like to see tomorrow?
- Where could you see it? How could you make sure that you could see it?
Have the groups come back together and share their charts. Talk about some of the things they listed. Ask them if anything they thought of was something that usually blends into the background or that is overlooked. (Examples might include: T-shirts, posters, traffic signs, fabric prints...)
Pick a few examples from their charts. Ask the students who made the art. Was it an individual or a group? How did the artist learn how to create what they saw? Explain that folk arts are related to groups, even if they are done by individuals. Folk arts are forms of art that get passed down from one person to another. Ask which arts they listed might work in these ways.
Ask students as a class to consider the following questions:
- What arts have nothing to do with you?
- Which arts do you make yourself?
- Which arts do friends or people in your family do every day or on special days?
- What arts do you use that come from your family?
- What arts do you use that come from your friends?
- What arts are about your experience?
Ask students to write a journal entry about art. Ask them to consider the following questions:
- What art speaks to you?
- How do you express yourself when you are most comfortable, most at home?
- What artistic "languages" do you speak?
