The public schools of North Carolina provide access to a comprehensive arts education for students from kindergarten through graduation, including dance, music, vocal and instrumental music, theatre arts, technical theatre, and visual arts.
The N.C. Department of Public Instruction (DPI) has released guides for parents by artistic discipline and by grade. Click on the image below to get straight to the guides and start exploring.
The guides help parents understand the major concepts in the NC Standard Course of Study as well as how “to partner with their student’s teacher, school, or district at home,” according to the website.
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The standards and the guides are organized around four artistic practices: connecting, creating, presenting, and responding, which align with the National Coalition for Art Standards.
Each guide includes tips for how parents can support their student’s artistic learning at home.
For instance, the kindergarten dance guide suggests:
Clear a little space so your child can move freely and safely.
Talk about how dance can be part of celebrations, traditions, or play.
Point out dance when observed in different cultural settings and traditions.
Talk about how different movements use different parts of the body. Explore the range of motion that different body parts allow.
Play an improvisation game where your child comes up with movements to words, such as “wiggle”, “pop”, or sounds like “swoosh”.
Help your child create a dance with three movements for the beginning, middle, and end.
Encourage your child to draw a picture of their favorite move, like a jump, spin, or pose.
Use scarves, stuffed animals, or ribbons to explore how props change movement.
Watch dance together and describe what the dancers are doing and the feelings or emotions that are evoked.
Practice giving compliments when watching your child dance.
— N.C. DPI parent guide for kindergarten dance
Additional resources are available through the NC K-12 Arts Education Resource Hub. Educators and parents are encouraged to “browse, reference, download, share, discuss, and adapt resources to meet the needs of their own students.”
You can also sign up for monthly K-12 Arts Education Newsletters here.
Shoutout to Brandon Roeder and Laura Stauderman at DPI for their leadership in the creation of these resources, and for their hope that educators and parents use them to “breathe life into these standards through meaningful arts-making” in classrooms and homes across the state.
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