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

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Butterfly Poem Project – 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.
• Code the Steps, Dance the Math!  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!
• 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!
• Playtime: Storytelling in Action 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.

2:40 – 3:10

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