Curriculum Support - The Arts

Welcome to the arts curriculum and instruction page. Here you will find resources for all arts content- dance, drama and theatre arts, music, and visual arts. The resources listed below have been developed through the Colorado Department of Education. Additional resources are available for your reference and/or use under the “additional curriculum support resources” link and are not specifically endorsed by the Colorado Department of Education.

This page contains supports designed to assist in the development of standards based curriculum resources for arts education. Supportive resources are separated in three section:

• Colorado's District Sample Curriculum Project
• Arts Integration and Title Programming Resources
• Curriculum Design Tools available from our Standards Implementation Toolkit

Colorado's District Sample Curriculum Project:

For the past two years,  the Standards and Instructional support team has been working with educators across the state of Colorado to build curriculum support resources for the successful implementation of the Colorado Academic Standards. To date, 116 school districts have participated in the authoring and/or refining of the processes and products of the Colorado District Sample Curriculum Project.

The Project, whose origins and goals are firmly grounded in standards-support requests from Colorado educators, has three main phases:

Phase I – Curriculum Overview Samples (Fall 2012) Colorado educators worked with fellow educators and the Standards and Instructional Support team in grade level and content area teams to engage in process of translating Colorado Academic Standards (CAS) into curriculum overview samples.

Phase II – (Area) Refining Workshops (Spring 2013) Colorado educators, in area workshops across the state, provided feedback on the Project, the curriculum overview samples, and the future work of the Project (i.e., Phase III).

Phase III – Instructional Unit Samples (Fall 2013-Winter 2014) Colorado educators worked with fellow educators and the Standards and Instructional Support team to build units based on select curriculum overview samples. In three-day workshops, district-teams of general education, special education, ELL, and gifted and talented educators/specialists worked together to plan for the instruction of all students.

Arts Integration and Title Programming Resources

Elementary Arts Integrated Units Available NOW! 

The Office of Standards and Instructional Support has released three new Colorado teacher-authored integrated elementary instructional units based on the Colorado Academic Standards.  The units integrate the arts with another content area providing instructional units that maintain the integrity of each discipline.  The units were developed by a collaborative group of elementary classroom and arts educators and community arts partners in response to requests from the field.

In the coming months, educators and arts specialists will be creating additional arts integrated units with the goal of having one integrated sample at each grade level kindergarten through grade 5 with the intention of expanding the work into the middle school grade levels

Title Programming Connections

With the current educational focus on 21st century skills and Postsecondary and Workforce Readiness, it is imperative to identify key benefits and constraints of arts integration models within Title I programming. The following documents provide information related to the Arizona case study for Title and Arts programming, share the benefits of arts education, identify the alignment between arts programming and Title requirements and review downloadable resources available for arts integration planning within Title I schools.

2010 Title I and Arts Education Resources

• Colorado Arts and Title I Guidebook 
• Title I and the Arts PowerPoint Presentation
• Varieties of Arts Integration Models

In addition to the Colorado resources above developed in 2010, please consider the following valuable documents:

• The California Alliance for Arts Educations has recently (2013) released a comprehensive guidebook outlining strong practices for using arts education to meet Title 1 Goals.
• U.S Department of Education to State Title I Coordinators letter outlining the parameters for using arts education in meeting Title I goals

Curriculum Design Tools:

• Vertical Progressions
• Standards Graphic Organizers
• Concept Connections (Kindergarten - 5th Grade)

For further assistance, please contact: