The Castle Valley Center has been spending time with the new Art Specialist, Daniel Bear who travels to different elementary schools within the district to help students with visual arts. A painter himself, he sees what art can do for students, particularly the young ones.
“At Castle Valley Center we are working with geometric shapes and recycling and so what we brought in a whole bunch of different parts of technology gears, we broke them apart like old computers and we’re putting together these really, really cool robots for kids to work with their hands and get to work with different shapes,” said Bear. This has been a fun project for students to learn and see the mechanics involved with robotics, plus helps with their dexterity and hand-eye coordination.
Bear works with the regular classroom teachers to deliver quality, sequential, and developmental arts instruction in alignment with the state Fine Arts Core Curriculum. He added, “Since its art integration so we’re trying to look at the different contents, so we look into history, reading, math, so we try to find out what some of the students are working on or maybe even struggling with these abstract ideas and we bring in the arts to get a different approach on to their learning.” Hands-on learning may help students better understand subjects that they may be struggling with but can better understand by getting their “hands dirty” so to speak.
The Beverly Taylor Sorenson Arts Learning Program (BTSAL) has been incorporated in 130 Utah Elementary schools and is what helped fund an Art Specialist in the district this year. Teachers have found through the program that students have shown improved test scores and behavior. “I really don’t have to deal with too much of behavioral issues just because they are so engaged in the learning process. I love it, they love it, it just makes my job that so much easier,” said Bear.
The amount of time that he spends at each school depends on the size of the school population. “So next is Bruin Point so I’m really excited about that, it’s just kind of a smaller school and I like that because you get to work with smaller groups of kids and maybe even get to do bigger projects just because there are fewer students,” said Bear. The Castle Valley Students will be finished up with Mr. Bear and this week.
Students at Castle Valley are excited for the upcoming holidays and are looking forward to their annual Halloween Party on Monday; they are also practicing for a Thanksgiving program as well as for Christmas caroling to perform for the entire community.
To learn more about Castle Valley Center, visit their website at http://www.carbonschools.org/CastleValley.cfm?subpage=737646