If you have any questions, please contact info@artsforoaklandkids.org

Program Description

Attitudinal Healing Connection (AHC): ArtEsteem — This visual art class uses standard based art instruction, combined with cultural, environmental and social emotional concepts to create fun and engaging student art projects.

Destiny Arts Center (DAC): Diasporic Movement Arts — Destiny Arts Center (Destiny) inspires and ignites social change through the arts, connecting Oakland and East Bay youth with hip hop dance, traditional African dance, theatre, capoeira, and martial arts classes taught by professional artists who are primarily people of color. Anchored by our Warrior’s Code values (love, honor, respect, responsibility, and peace), Destiny Teaching Artists establish a classroom culture of welcome to support young people’s sense of safety and connection in all of our programs. The dramatic shifts caused by the pandemics have accelerated our focus on supporting the mental health and physical and emotional wellbeing of our youth by integrating somatic (body-based) healing practices into our instruction.

Junior Center of Art and Science (LJCP): Making Connections — This arts-integrated residency is focused on introducing students to different techniques in visual arts while also making connections to classroom curriculum. The program is designed to scaffold the learning for future visual work in subsequent grades. Students will explore drawing and painting as well as 3D design. Visual arts basics such as color mixing, line, shape, and texture will be grounded in the work of diverse contemporary artists and explored through hands on projects and Visual Thinking Strategies. Students will have the opportunity to experiment with materials, but we will also use our projects to make connections to classroom learning in science and social studies.

Living Jazz Children’s Project (LJCP): World Rhythms — World Rhythms and Songs of Social Change are complementary components of the Living Jazz Children’s Project that also function well as stand-alone entities. They are designed to expose young students to the cultural underpinnings of jazz while teaching music fundamentals in the context of social justice and cultural diversity. Through simple body percussion rhythms (hambone) and eventually complex polyrhythms and techniques for conga drums, agogo bells, maracas and other instruments, students learn to feel rhythm—the foundation of all music learning—within their own bodies and work as part of a team to produce a unified sound. Lessons such as Drumming Rules! (Literal and Figurative), Introduction to Body Percussion and West African Traditional 6/8 Bell Pattern cover the history, culture and geography of specific rhythms in relation to the African Diaspora and are taught by master percussionists with decades of experience teaching in public schools.

Living Jazz Children’s Project: Songs of Social Change — World Rhythms and Songs of Social Change are complementary components of the Living Jazz Children’s Project that also function well as stand-alone entities. They are designed to expose young students to the cultural underpinnings of jazz while teaching music fundamentals in the context of social justice and cultural diversity. From the first choral lesson, students sing and think about music as a force for social change, learning and discussing the lyrics of such songs as We Don’t Need to Wait to Be Great (“We have the power to make things right; Dr. King told us ‘I have a dream’; All you have to do is believe”). Subsequent lessons cover social change leaders Rosa Parks, Cesar Chavez, Clara Elizabeth Chan Lee, Mother Theresa and others, as students practice singing as an ensemble, moving in unison, keeping rhythmic time, following choral directions and incorporating gestures and body percussion. Nurturing and highly accomplished music educators provide a joyous and inspirational experience of singing as a team about the power of social activism.

Programs Availability per Grade

√ = Available for that grade

Program Costs, Delivery and Contact

OUSD Elementary Schools with Gaps