Young Audiences and John Hope Elementary School

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• Jane is joined by Kalan Brown, Education Director for the Young Audiences program at the Woodruff Arts Center to discuss the role that arts play in education.
• Young Audiences is working with schools to put artists in the classrooms and thereby using art forms to teach core content areas.
• Kalan explains how a residency program, such as smART stART, is a really unique program that brings a whole new dimension to teaching.
• With smART stART, teachers are finding support for Georgia's "performance based standards" by learning to assess student performance in different ways and finding new measures for their success in the classroom.

The Alliance Theater and Seaborn Lee Elementary School

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• To discuss how teaching artists impact students, Jane speaks with a teaching artist from the Alliance Theater, Barry Stuart Mann. As a storyteller and actor, Barry participates in the Alliance's program designed to develop content for literacy instruction and funded by an award from the federal Department of Education's Arts Education Model Development and Dissemination grant.
• Joining Jane and Barry is LaSherma Croffie, a kindergarten teacher from Seaborn Lee Elementary School and current Teacher of the Year.
• Barry instills into his teaching that "Stories can be anywhere!" He explains how using drama strategies, such as the "story basket," can bring the theater to the students and present the stories to encourage students to develop more abstract ways of thinking, speaking and writing.
• LaSherma shares with us how she "sets the stage" for her students during story telling time and then they become the characters as they move and demonstrate to tell the stories. Together, she and Barry are combining drama and literacy.