The performing arts can play a distinctive role in deepening literacy understanding and skills. In New York State, performing arts educators are expected to collaborate in developing curriculum and activities that enhance literacy comprehension. There are a number of websites that are beginning to address these issues and may serve as useful stating points as you develop your own ideas and applications. Here are a few websites to start with:

Building Literacy Through the Arts in Early Childhood

This is a distinctive website organized by America Reads and based on the premise that the business of children is play. The arts become an arena for exploration and discovery.

Learning, Literacy, and the Arts

I D E A S Workshops provide a framework for infusing the arts into the general curriculum. One of the goals is articulated as follows:
"Explore the artistic processes of creating, performing, and responding in music, visual art, dance/movement, and drama/language arts."

Arts in Education

This website begins with the following statement: "Always among the highest expression of every culture, the arts teach us much about every historical period through its literature, visual arts, music, dance, and drama. Today it is recognized that to be truly well educated one must not only learn to appreciate the arts, but must have rich opportunities to actively participate in creative work. The arts are languages that most people speak, cutting through individual differences in culture, educational background, and ability. They can bring every subject to life and turn abstractions into concrete reality. Learning through the arts often results in greater academic achievement and higher test scores."

Position Statement on Learning through the Performing Arts

Can the performing arts be used to teach literacy skills? Linda Mahdesian explores this idea. This brief website describes a course that was developed for high school students.

A View of Literacy in the Arts

The arts can be a way of experiencing and knowing the world that enriches the lives of stgudents as they grow in their skills of comprehension and writing. Each art has a particular perspective to bring to the table. This PDF file is an article that thoghtfully explores literacy and the arts, and the power of the arts to motivate and actually develop skills.

Intentional

This is an outstanding website that examines literacy through different facets of a prism: Active, Collaborative, Reflective, Complex, Constructive, Conversational, Contextualized, and Intentional. This is a website rich with examples and discussion. Certainly worth exploring for ideas as well as demonstrations. There is even a Quicktime movie that evokes the spirit of the project and might well serve as a model for your own project.