Sixth Grade

ArtsAlive! Sixth Grade is geared to ages 11–13 and aligns with select National Core Arts Standards and Common Core English Language Arts Standards for sixth and seventh grade. Each of the four Experiences center on a domain of art—first music, then theater, creative writing, and the visual arts—but they all focus on storytelling and contain engaging, interdisciplinary components. From writing lyrics and scripts, to learning about cartooning and animation, to playing chords on a ukulele, students build both skills and self-confidence. 

Experience 1: Stories Through Song

In this Experience, students combine music, storytelling, and poetry to compose their own song. First, they’re taught how to tune and care for a ukulele and explore the basics of chords and chord progressions. Next, they’ll learn how songs are created with form and how songwriters and lyricists use rhyme to make their songs meaningful and memorable. Finally, they’ll use all of their new knowledge to tell a story through music and song and will even design an album to showcase their creativity. 

Experience 2: Stories on Stage and on Screen

In this Experience, students learn some history of screenwriting and playwriting and come to understand how actors and directors work together to bring these scripts to life. They’ll also explore theater from different parts of the world, including Africa, Japan, China, and Hollywood. Then it will be their turn! They’ll be led through activities to help them develop a unique character, build a setting and structure for a story, and learn how music soundtracks impact storytelling. They’ll combine all they’ve explored through the lessons and activities to write their own monologue and can record themselves performing it.  

Experience 3: My Myth

Humans have always shared stories—like myths, legends, fables, and folk tales—to help us make sense of the world. At the beginning of this Experience, students will hear a collection of these “Why?” stories and will then be challenged to write an etiological story of their own. They’ll explore topics like theme, figurative language, dialogue, and imagery, and they’ll also practice fun ways to draw and costume their character. Their culminating project is to write an etiological story, draw its main character, and describe the different music they’d include as a soundtrack. 

Experience 4: Stories with Words and Pictures

For the last Experience in ArtsAlive! Sixth Grade, students will come to understand the creative process behind comics, animation, and graphic novels. They’ll begin with a little history of these art forms and then proceed through a series of engaging lessons that cover all elements of art so they can learn to draw and letter like a cartoonist. The main project has them designing a detailed page from a graphic novel that captures a scene from the etiological story they developed in Experience 3.