How to Use these Lessons, Workshops, and Activities
Cultivating spaces in which young people can speak to issues, tell their stories, and express their thoughts and ideas is at the core of Apollo Stories.
PROJECTS
Apollo Stories partners with an artist(s) from the Apollo main stage to serve as the source material for each project. These artists have been chosen because of the themes in their work and their fundamental commitment to using art as an educational instrument.
FELLOWS
Apollo Stories Fellows are a cohort of educators from across the country, nominated by their colleagues and peers. They craft the lessons, activities, and workshops for the site.
Message From the Creator
Each lesson contains a video message from the author(s) with helpful hints of how to facilitate the lesson and/or notes of why they created this set of activities.
THEMES
Lessons, activities and workshops can be searched by themes inside those lessons that you will find below the title and the creator of each lesson.
LESSON TOOLKIT
The toolkit was created to give the user a snapshot of what to expect in the lesson. This includes any materials they will need to facilitate the lesson as well as some insight to the media used, any prework needed and essential questions, objectives and social-emotional learning resources.
Lesson Navigation
- Warm Up
A warm-up activity to activate the needed; critical thinking skills, emotions, awareness or past knowledge needed to set the stage for the activities and conversation points. - Conversation
A scaffolded activity that deepens the engagement and prepares the learner to create. This section typically engages the use of some form of media. - Center Stage
The heart of the lesson. Typically, the generative section of the lesson where the user will create some form of story. - Sharing
Sharing of the Center Stage activity. This section may not apply to: Educator Resource Lessons, Mini-Lessons or Multiday Project Lessons. - Action
A call to action for the user to synthesize what they have learned in the lesson. This could range from a homework assignment to a student-led political action at a school, or to sharing your story publicly.
How to Use these Lessons, Workshops and Activities
These materials were created by educators just for you– whether you are a classroom teacher, work in an after-school or arts setting, or are a parent/guardian. While we have built each lesson and workshop sequentially, feel free to tailor your exploration of them to suit your needs. You may choose to follow a lesson as provided from beginning to end or select sections of various lessons and combine them for a different approach. What matters most is that you use these materials to help you engage young people in meaningful ways.
Levels
Lessons are created for different levels so that you, the user, can have a quick reference for how each activity fits into the overall learning framework on the site. For example, our introductory lessons provide preliminary activities or early entry points into a conversation, while our more advanced lessons are targeted for educators who may already be doing similar work and may require multiple layers or even several days of related activities.
- Introductory: An entry level lesson that could be appropriate and adapted for any high school age learner regardless of background in the topic or artmaking.
- Intermediate: A lesson that may have “pre-work” suggestions to ensure that you and your high school age learners are prepared. These typically dive a bit deeper into the topic and provide multiple avenues to investigate complex issues.
- Advanced: A lesson that will challenge your high school-age learners through assessments, and constructing hypotheses, as well as any form of more advanced storytelling/artmaking. The lesson will require prior work in the content area to have been done. These lessons will have your high school-age learners applying concepts, creating, and developing logical arguments.
STANDARDS
We have provided learning standards as a resource, while understanding that needs vary based on the educational spaces in which you work or practice.
You may be utilizing these lessons with your own high school age learner at home, or at a community center and have no need for learning standards. That’s fine too. We encourage you to utilize the standards that are most useful for you and, of course, adapt them for your learning space or home usage as needed.
We encourage you to give us feedback as to which learning standards (Common Core, National Arts, e.g.) would be most helpful to you or to your learning institution as you utilize these lessons and activities. This learning community will continue to grow and develop as you provide your voice throughout.
The standards included in our lessons have been pulled in the aggregate from a variety of resources including the National Core Arts Standards, Depth of Knowledge learning chart, the New York City Blueprint for Teaching in the Arts, Social Justice Standards, and Next Generation ELA Learning Standards among them.
