Curriculum | Dance & Music

Hip to be Square

Hip to be Square

After looking at works from Keith Haring's "Dance" book, 3rd grade students use a square piece of paper to design their own Keith Haring dance composition. Using markers, they outline and color in their shapes solidly like Keith Haring's paintings

Musical Collages

Musical Collages

Toddlers and preschoolers were introduced to Keith Haring by reading the book Pop Warhol's Top by Julie Appel and Amy Guglielmo and looking at photos of Keith Haring and his artworks. Afterwards, the children used various materials to make their own musical mixed media collages.

Jumping Kids Art

Jumping Kids Art

Our 2nd graders did a fabulous job as they created these amazing pictures in the style of Keith Haring. We learned how to draw basic body shapes in proportion by drawing ovals. We drew an oval for the head, a bigger oval for the body, 3 smaller ovals for each arm, and then 3 ovals for each leg. We learned that our body only bends where we have a joint... in this case where two of our ovals met. We drew people doing all kinds of fun things. Ideally, the children drew figures doing something that was important to them... something they loved. Then we cut out our figures and glued them down. We tried to overlap the figures to show depth. This was a hard concept for the children to understand, but it was really interesting to see the results. Finally, we created some visual texture by making a beautiful patterned floor for our figures to dance on. I love the energy in all of these pictures. In the 2nd picture especially, you can actually see the children playing basketball. The overlapping in this piece of artwork provides so much depth to the picture.

Lesson Series

Lesson Series

Children from the Netherlands explore a unit on Keith Haring, including Tee-shirt stamping and collaborative, mural-sized drawings.

Friends Mural

Friends Mural

A fun and easy, project that will leave your walls full of color and energy.

Dancing Silhouettes

Dancing Silhouettes

After a dance lesson about statues, these youngsters looked at Keith Haring pictures and drew their own silhouettes on the asphalt outside their school.

Character Traits in Fables

Character Traits in Fables

Fourth and Fifth grade Special Education students wrote fables, created a subway mural, dance freeze cut outs, illustrations and sculptures of their characters, wrote a song and choreographed a dance for each character, and designed a web page of their work on the project.

Haring Mobiles

This lesson was sent to us by a school in New Jersey whose students designed and constructed their own Haring-inspired hanging mobiles. A great extension to lessons involving the figure and movement.

Water Tank Mural

Water Tank Mural

This middle school in Australia used Keith Haring's dancing figures as inspiration for a mural on a water tank using characters that represent their school subjects.

Kindergarten Mural

Kindergarten Mural

Small groups of students danced to music in the hallway, while tracing their bodies in movement poses on colored paper. They were cut out, glued onto one large sheet of paper, and outlined in black paint to brighten up our school hallway.

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