Small And Powerful Integrations

Today I'm watching one of our wonderful university students teaching a class of second graders about the use of apostrophes in contractions and possessive nouns. For contractions, she had them come up with actions with a partner to demonstrate the process of turning two separate words into a contraction. The children came up with some creative ideas complete with signs for the apostrophe. She invited multiple partnerships to share there ideas. It could also be memorable to have the entire class imitate each one. 

This is an example of a small and powerful integration, which includes the introduction of brief arts experiences as part of a larger lesson. Often children add these on their own. They drum on their desks, they use a particularly expressive voice along with facial expression, or they doodle. For example, the teacher in the above example had the students write P or C on their individual white boards to show whether a given word was a possessive pronoun or a contraction. Some of the students were creating interesting designs with their P's and C's. They could also strike a pose for P or C, do a specific action, or make a certain sound (drum on desk, stomp feet, clap hands).

​Other small and powerful integrations for this lesson could include 1) using a song or chant about contractions to remember the rules and to create the contractions or 2) using dance to create contractions: one student moves into position and says the first word and then the second moves into position (whole body or just hands) somehow complementing or filling the negative space in the first students pose and saying the second word, then they both say the contraction — developing contractions becomes a performance.

For an extended integration activity, the students drew pictures to demonstrate the differences between two sentences, identical with the exception of apostrophe placement.