Clockwise from upper left, teacher Krista Pruett, musicians Staci Spring and Rick Rushing and teacher Nedra Moody participated in a summer residency program through UTC’s Arts-Based Collaborative and the Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts.
UTC’s Arts-Based Collaborative (ABC), made history last year when it became the first higher-education program to collaborate with the national Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts, bringing arts-based teaching and learning to early childhood classrooms in the Chattanooga region.
As a Wolf Trap affiliate, ABC—formerly Southeast Center for Education in the Arts—hosts residencies for local early childhood teachers. Through the residencies, local artists work in the classroom alongside teachers to introduce new ways of integrating the arts into their curriculum and help children develop a love of learning and the performing arts as well as the skills to pursue both.
This summer’s residency has a new look in response to COVID-19. Supported with a grant from the Weldon F. Osborne Foundation, the summer residency went online to partner with the Chattanooga Head Start and Early Head Start program.
Artists working with teachers from the Early Head Start locations include five musicians and one drama artist. They are paired with teachers from four classrooms, all at different Chattanooga Early Head Start locations: Avondale, Cedar Hill, Youth and Family Development Center and Daisy Early Head Start.
Engaging children with multiple sensory activities sets them up for a stronger future, explained Angela Dittmar, director of teaching artists residencies for ABC.
“People are nuanced and there’s multiple forms of intelligence that blossom as a child grows. Children learn in different styles and the arts help infuse a curriculum with multiple ways of engaging, especially the children who might get misunderstood, those who need tactile engagement, those who need to move more,” Dittmar said.
“We think of dancers, who we celebrate. Those people are kinetic learners. They need to move and as children they probably showed that. We need to be able to engage children through multiple sensory engagements and strategy so that those skills are strengthened and nurtured.”
Keeping in touch
Nedra Moody and Krista Pruett share a classroom of students at Chattanooga Head Start’s Avondale location. They’ve been with the same group of two-year-old students since the toddlers were nine months old.
“We’re supposed to have them for three years, just to get that family connection. We’ve definitely connected and love those kids,” Pruett said.
Since their center closed for in-person care in mid-March due to the coronavirus, Moody and Pruett have maintained those connections online. Through Facetime and over Zoom, they’ve read books, sang songs and talked with their kids.
“They’re so excited when they see us. They want ‘Pruett and Moody,’” Pruett laughed. “Even at the beginning, they were holding their phone and walking around their house showing us stuff. I had one who went all of the way outside to the garden to show me what they were growing.”
For their summer residency, Moody and Pruett started working with local musicians Staci Spring and Rick Rushing with sessions over Zoom, learning new ways to implement music in the classroom.
Spring, a bassoonist, and Rushing, a blues musician, introduced new songs for welcoming students to class, songs to ease transitions to new activities throughout the day and, with a nod to current times, a new handwashing song.
They took it a step further and helped the teachers create music videos to use when connecting with their students virtually for now as well as back in the classroom.
“The artists have helped us a lot to just not worry about being in front of the camera,” Pruett added. “It’s for the kids. It doesn’t matter what I sound like. They love it anyway.”
Fun & Learning
In one video, the teachers and musicians make use of the Brady Bunch-style squares of their Zoom session to perform an introduction song. They pretend to pass an instrument through the squares to tap as they introduce themselves.
In another, they perform “Old McDonald Had a Farm” with Spring on bassoon, Rushing on guitar and even a pet dog making an appearance. The words “dog,” “cat” and “cow” display on the screen with their corresponding animal.
“You see the word ‘cat’ on the screen. So you’re getting to see the words. You’re getting to see your teacher. You’re getting to hear the melody. You’re getting to sing along yourself,” Rushing said.
With those “ingredients,” Rushing explained, “serotonin levels in the frontal lobes are all firing, and everybody is smiling. That’s when you’re going to be more receptive to learn and have connections.”
Writing songs and making videos were tools used by all teacher-artist partnerships this summer. Using the term “language bathing,” singing those songs to help early learners transition to different activities or wash their hands, plants new words in their minds, Dittmar said.
She noted that UTC Education Professor Sarah Sandefur has shown that children growing up in poverty may understand three million less words less than other children. “That means just hearing words is triggering their mind and building up their synapses,” Dittmar said.
“When you have families who are experiencing hardships or working multiple jobs, they’re just not able to spend the day talking to their child, labeling things or giving words to expressions. I think that’s a pretty profound statement and has a huge impact on their literacy development as they move up through Head Start and into kindergarten.”
