Greenbelt Elementary School first-graders took on parts as beavers, ducks, and turtles Oct. 29 to interpret and act out parts of a book they read in class.
Through the students' interpretation, Greenbelt Elementary teachers are seeing the effects firsthand of how using the arts with reading increases students' comprehension.
"When the students can retell a story in their own words by paraphrasing, they're demonstrating reader comprehension," said Lenore Blank Kelner, an arts education consultant from the Maryland Artist/Teaching Institute, or MATI, who is working with teachers at the school.
In July, five teachers and Principal Kimberly Seidel took a weeklong class at MATI at the University of Maryland, College Park, to learn about incorporating music, dance, drama, poetry, visual arts and puppets into their teaching practices. MATI was established in 1994 for all grade levels of teachers and school administrators.
"The focus of MATI is arts configuration — the merging of the objective that the state wants each grade level to achieve in reading with what the state has said a student should be able to do in drama," Blank Kelner said.
Seidel said that the MATI training piqued the interest of some of the teachers at the school that had heard about the program. They applied for and were accepted to the program soon after.
In addition to their weeklong summer training, Kelner also went to Greenbelt Elementary in September for a mandatory half-day workshop to teach all of the teachers about arts integration, not just the teachers that originally attended the workshop.
"Right now it's a journey, not a race, to see how we can make everything work together," Seidel said.
The last leg of their journey came to fruition Oct. 29 when Kelner visited the school to see the students act out parts of books they had been reading in class.
First-grade teacher Natalie Ewalt and her students worked on "Little Beaver and the Echo" by Amy MacDonald.
Playing the part of the little beaver was Yunis Qudah, 6, of Greenbelt, who said acting out the book required "cooperation, and you have to change your body and your voice and focus."
Hailee Christian, 6, of Greenbelt said acting out the book would help her remember it better than other things they've read in class.
"The ones I act out, I will remember it even if we don't do it on paper," Hailee said, meaning if the students aren't reading from the book, but doing an impromptu performance.
Without the MATI training, the students would only be exposed to the art curriculum three to four times a year for an hour at a time, because the school shares an art teacher with three other area schools, Seidel said.
Ewalt said she wished she would have learned the MATI skills sooner and that she plans to continue to use arts with reading.
"The kids are always really good at listing the characters when we read a story, but when we bring the story to life they become the character and the setting," Ewalt said. "They're really doing reading objectives like making inferences or predictions."
E-mail Jordan Attebury at jattebury@gazette.net.
