contact@kintelplus.org Professional Development Workshops Teaching Artists offer workshops for classroom faculty and school arts specialists to become familiar with the theory and practice that support activities our teaching artists use to engage student creativity. We offer workshops for District Superintendent's Day as an inschool and afterschool Teacher Professional Development. Participants learn to design units of study using dance, drama and storytelling as a learning tool. Kinesthetic Intelligence Plus is always ready to design a customized professional development seminar or workshop series for grade level, school wide or district wide professionals.   Current Workshops available:   Using Theatre Games to Teach Social Emotional Literacy Teaching as Storytelling in the Classroom Tell About a Time When: Stories One Generation Tells Another Tell Me a Story, Dance Me a Dance Your Move, My Move! - Reading Body Language Math Dancing Dancing the Water Cycle Dancing Verbs, Similes, Poetry and Me Teaching Tolerance with Pass-Around Storytelling: The Shared Storytelling Game Mean Words, Mean Moves      Using Theatre Games to Teach Social Emotional Literacy   Theatre games teach students to take risks, learn trust, communicate, collaborate and develop kindness and empathy. This series of workshops help students learn how to recognize and understand the complex world of being a good friend, or not. Through game play students strengthen awareness of non-verbal communication. They experience how much can be revealed and understood about another person's mind set and mood through facial expression, body posture and tone of voice.  While gaming with dialogue from popular song lyrics and slam poetry students "play" theatrically with the many scenarios that take place in the hallways, playground and cafeterias of their schools. They create original theatre scenes in which they ask themselves: When do I step up, step in, step away? What do I say? How do I say it?  Developing Social Emotional Skills through theatre is fun. It is play with a purpose.      Teaching as Storytelling in the Classroom Children and adults use drama and conflict to make sense of the world.  How can classroom teachers use storytelling to teach “big ideas” to their students? This workshop guides participants in identifying the powerful conflicts that engage student interest on a gut level, and bring an educational theme to life.  Learn how to organize content into a story that allows students to actively participate in problem solving the dramatic conflict inherent in the story being told. Lead students to deep, powerful understanding.  Examples of conflicts:  unknown vs. known/ safety vs. risk/ trust vs. suspicion/ kind vs. mean/ bully vs.victim.   Tell About a Time When: Stories One Generation Tells Another How do questions open up the door for elders to teach younger ones important life lessons learned? Questions such as these: “Tell about a time when you were afraid to do something but you did it anyway…someone was nice to you when you least expected it…someone gave you a gift that you didn’t expect…” Learn storytelling techniques that help you to capture golden nuggets of truth to share with your students. Through listening, speaking, reading and writing we let one another know that we are not alone.  Tell Me a Story, Dance Me a Dance How are elements of a good literacy lesson integrated into a good dance lesson? Base the dance lesson on good literature. A dance can be built using the rich imagery and thematic material found inside a wonderful storybook. One must look for the movement inherent in the story. You can illustrate a story with movement or use movement to explore an intriguing idea found inside its pages. Bring your favorite storybook and come prepared to dance. Your Move, My Move!  Explore the power of non-verbal communication. Understand that all movement has meaning from the smallest gesture to the largest postural stance. Body postures and gestures can tell a story about how we feel, even when our words contradict our body language.  Experience making improvisational movement studies and practice reading body language. Experience the power of reading body language together as a tool for building a sense of community and trust.  Math Dancing Basic arithmetic skills, spatial concepts and orientation, shaping and shape relationships, X-Y coordinates, symmetry and asymmetry, and fractions are all taught through dance with the more complex concepts of probability, continuity and complexity interwoven. The student choreographer must coordinate TIME (music and rhythmic patterns) and SPACE (how dancers orient themselves in the space) with the ORDER of the sequences of movement and then ORGANIZE it all into a coherent expression of an idea. This is the stuff of multidimensional thinking, the kind that satisfies, engages and inspires.   Dancing the Water Cycle  "One upon a time there was a rain drop who yearned to be part of the ocean so one day"... Learn to create an experiential learning environment that enables students to learn the water cycle through science, storytelling, a song about the water cycle (Tom Chapin's And the Wheel of the Water), creative movement that brings the song lyrics to life and a visual arts project that makes a great mural in the hallway outside of your classroom.  Dancing Verbs, Similes, Poetry and Me Learn to use tools from creative movement pedagogy to enhance language aquistion through kinesthetic intelligence. Develop original poetry and dances together. Focusing on a variety of props (hoops, silk scarves, rain stick, balloons) that will bring key verbs and adverbs to mind, students are led to explore those verbs and adverbs through body movement. They then compose similes, which become poems, which in turn are developed into dances. "Rising gently and spreading slowly" are verb and adverb pairs that open up a world of imagery such as: "Rising gently, spreading slowly like flowers in the golden sun, the people opened their arms to welcome one another, one by one." An excellent inroad to language aquisition for English Language Learners and Special Education students.    Teaching Tolerance with Pass-Around Storytelling: The Shared Storytelling Game Pass-Around Storytelling is play with a purpose.  Participants learn to use this interactive, oral storytelling game to express and identify thoughts and feelings around issues of diversity, tolerance and bullying.  Storytstarter(tm) cards provide themes as well as obstacles to be overcome in each story. Thinkabouts(tm) suggest ideas to move the story forward.  Participants learn to create stories together. No one person is responsible. The story making is a group endeavor. Once imagined, stories can be scripted for informal performance. Great take away tool for use in the classroom.  Mean Words, Mean Moves    WORDS, a poem about bullying is the jumping off point. Theatre activities and movement exercises follow as participants explore the roles of bully, target and bystander.  Body postures, hand gestures and facial expressions, sounds, words and statements are used to embody different emotional and physical states of being. Participants reflect and analyze feelings and opinions about what they are seeing and doing.  Movement studies are developed, poetry is written and the work is performed.