Here are some resources to help you integrate and implement the arts into your school’s classrooms. Please see the specifics regarding each opportunity and explore the information to help make positive arts contributions for your students.  

  • The Ovation Foundation’s Arts Ed Toolkit

The Arts Ed Toolkit by the Ovation Foundation aims to provide free and easily accessible arts education resources to enhance arts curriculum for teachers and students. The toolkit includes resources on a variety of art forms, including visual arts, music, theater and more, in line with the National Core Arts Standards for 9th-12th grade. Each resource provides a detailed lesson plan that is applicable to the Kentucky Academic Standards for the Arts. Also included are images and professionally produced video clips that are chunked in to short segments. Interviews with practicing artists also provide for career studies in the arts. For more information, go to the Ovation Foundation website.

  • Book release: “Preparing Educators for Arts Integration”

A new book, “Preparing Educators for Arts Integration,” edited by Lesley University professors Gene Diaz and Martha Barry McKenna,  was released in February.. The book was developed through the work of the Arts Education Partnership’s Higher Education Working Group.

This resource examines professional development approaches from across the United States to help schools and allied arts groups integrate the arts into an already crowded K–12 curriculum. The authors document the purposes and structures of a broad spectrum of current efforts and programs. Several of these programs have been in place for decades, thus demonstrating their sustainability and effectiveness. Readers will find strong, empirically tested models of arts integration to inform curriculum development and teacher professional learning.

For more information, go to the Teachers College Press.

  • Little Kids Rock and Epiphone to donate 10,000 guitars

Little Kids Rock teamed up with Epiphone Instruments to launch a nationwide initiative to bring 10,000 new Epiphone guitars to public school music programs throughout the United States in 2017. Lead guitarist of Heart and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Nancy Wilson is the official artist ambassador of the new initiative, offering her music tips and experience to students receiving the donated guitars.

Teachers apply to be trained to use Little Kids Rock’s innovative and transformational methodology. After their training is complete, teachers receive a donation of curricula, instruments and other resources so that they can launch modern band music programming for students at their school.

For more information, go to Little Kids Rock.