Green Literacy & Arts Resilience: Empowering K-5 Educators
Tuesday, Nov 05, 2024
Lorena Cervantes - Part 1: Florida Ecology, Literacy and Movement
National Workshop Leader | The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
Lorena Cervantes is a national workshop leader for The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. She brings over a decade of experience as the Arts-Integration dance teacher at Bailey’s Elementary School for the Arts and Sciences. And Lorena worked for over fifteen years as a Master Artist for the Wolf Trap Institute for Early Learning through the Arts where she led residencies and professional development workshops throughout the United States and abroad. Ms. Cervantes was the 2017 recipient of the Hispanic Teacher of the Year award and the 2018 recipient of the Hispanic Heritage Month Proclamation for Fairfax County Public Schools. Lorena was born and raised in Costa Rica where she began her professional career as a dancer. She rose to be a Professor of Dance at the National University of Costa Rica and the director of the National Dance Company. She holds an MFA in dance from George Washington University.
Work in Progress: Developing an Arts-based Culture of Resilience in the K-5 classroom is an arts-based program for K-5 students designed to meet modern social and emotional learning needs through the creation of introspective artwork. Using the magic of elementary art, facilitate the building of a toolkit focusing on proactive strategies for whole child health. Walk away with a full, cost-effective program ready for immediate implementation across grade levels. Today, even our youngest students face social and emotional challenges. Influenced by a personal interest in arts and health, Work in Progress was developed with the intention of meeting the needs of our students in today's tumultuous social and political climate. By using the naturally introspective process of art making paired with explicit instruction about coping mechanisms, self-confidence, social awareness and empathy, it is our hope that students will face the social and emotional challenges of today's world with a toolkit of strategies for maintaining a healthy mental state.
- Attendees will learn how to implement the Work in Progress program with accommodations and modifications for learners of all skill levels.
- Attendees will understand the value of cross curricular learning and multimodal data collection as it relates to educational equity in assessment of understanding.
- Attendees will create their own introspective artwork demonstrating the power of understanding mental health through art.