COSACOSA's curriculum for Spare A Dime connects history with civic responsibility.
An integral part of Spare A Dime is focused on exploring the project's themes with city youth. As created by the COSACOSA education team featured in our posts this week, the Spare A Dime curriculum has three components, adaptable to all grade levels. In the first section of the curriculum, students study the Great Depression, its causes, and its impact on the country -- interactively examining the era through the eyes of our Spare A Dime characters. In the second phase of the curriculum, students learn about various New Deal programs, including the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Working in small groups, they even plan new civic art, music, theater, and writing projects in the spirit of the WPA's Federal Project Number One and create WPAesque posters for their initiatives. In the third portion of our curriculum, students connect what they've learned with socioeconomic issues today, centering on definitions of freedom and justice, and the balance of each citizen's rights and responsibilities. As a final project, they design a dime to reflect their newly-minted ideas of liberty. COSACOSA's Art and Education initiative, Art Smart, infuses hands-on art-making activities as an educational tool across the K-12 curriculum. Working with Philadelphia students and teachers both during and after school hours, the program enhances participants' literacy, math, science and social studies learning, as well as critical thinking abilities. If you are a teacher and would like to bring our Spare A Dime curriculum into your classroom and arrange a field trip to our performances, please contact us. We'd love to work with you! Get your tickets now to see Spare A Dime at PIFA 13 -- and learn more about COSACOSA's ongoing initiatives at www.cosacosa.org! Images (from top): Bok Tech students design new Liberty dimes; student-created WPA posters; COSACOSA teaching artists John Pickersgill and Sharnae Johnson discuss a student's WPA poster. |