Feature Presentation
“Arts-Integrated Instruction Without Losing Rigor”

Join arts integration instructional coach Sarah Coenen for a hands-on exploration of practical arts integration strategies that increase engagement, support higher-level thinking, and align with required standards—while maintaining rigor and instructional pacing.

Roundtable Sessions

2:40 – 3:10

1. Mothman in Mythology: A Collage of the Hero’s Journey invites students to explore how modern urban legends echo ancient mythic patterns. Drawing inspiration from The Mothman Prophecies, students reinterpret the eerie Mothman legend through the lens of the Hero’s Journey. By transforming research and analysis into visual collage, they connect classic mythological structure with contemporary storytelling.
2. Learning can be messy—and that’s where the magic happens. Messy Starts, Mighty Minds uses hands-on art experiences to help elementary students build perseverance, embrace productive struggle, and turn mistakes into meaningful discoveries.
3. From Beats to Screens invites educators into the world of digital music creation and video production. Explore how middle school students can remix or compose original songs while applying elements of music, cinematic techniques, and storyboarding to bring their ideas to life through music videos.  Bring a device to experiment with music-making options.
4. Trifold Story blends visual art and creative writing by using a folded page as a canvas to explore foreground, middle ground, and background—helping writers visualize scenes and craft more detailed, engaging stories.
5. Geometry meets glow. In Illuminating Geometric Transformations, geometric concepts come to life through art. Students apply translations, reflections, rotations, and dilations while creating lanterns that highlight positive and negative space and deepen conceptual understanding.
6. Awesome Adjective Animal Artwork integrates visual art and English Language Arts to support standards-based instruction. Educators will explore strategies that help students identify and use adjectives to describe characters and objects while developing foundational drawing skills. Through discussion, sketching, and texture techniques, students create original animals that demonstrate understanding of descriptive language and visual representation aligned to grade-level ELA and visual arts standards.
7. Everyone has a story—what’s yours? In The Story of My Name, students write a personal narrative about the meaning or inspiration behind their name and bring it to life with a 2D art piece. Combine words and creativity to share your unique identity!
8. Lights. Camera. Imagination! Step into the world of Stop Motion and Movie Magic and learn how to bring stories to life one frame at a time. In this hands-on experience, you’ll create your own stop motion movie while discovering how this engaging art form can spark creativity, deepen learning, and connect seamlessly across subject areas. Perfect for classrooms of all kinds, stop motion transforms storytelling, science, math, and more into an interactive, student-centered experience.
9. Arts integration ideas are engaging—but are they driving real learning? In this session, educators will Test an Arts Integration Lesson using a simple process that examines what students are asked to do and how deeply they are thinking. Participants will break apart and refine a lesson to ensure both the academic content and the arts are purposeful. You’ll leave with a repeatable framework to know when an arts integration idea works—and when it needs refinement.
10. Learning comes alive through art as elementary students create, explore, and connect with Native American regions and cultures through arts-integrated lessons designed to be age-appropriate, interactive, and classroom-ready.
11. Code the Steps, Dance the Math! (Available during morning sessions only) Turn numbers into moves! Design a 10-step Hmong dance, “program” it for others, and explore math, coding, and science—all through the art of dance. Learn how rhythm and equations can move together!
12. Playtime: Storytelling in Action (Available during afternoon sessions only) explores how students can turn written stories into recorded theatrical performances through scriptwriting, set design, props, and puppetry—engaging multiple art forms to deepen comprehension and expression.
13. Butterfly Poem Project (Available during afternoon sessions only)– La mariposa de mi vida integrates world language, literacy, visual art, and social-emotional learning to support whole-child development. Educators will explore how students use an “I Am From / I Am” poem structure and figurative language in Spanish to reflect on identity, growth, and life experiences. Through creating a symbolic butterfly artwork, students express self-awareness and personal narrative using color, balance, and imagery—building empathy, reflection, and communication skills aligned to language, visual arts, and SEL competencies.

“I’m glad I came. It’s great to get ideas for the future.”