The Colorado Department of Education

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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:

The Colorado Department of Education (CDE) defines curriculum as an organized plan of instruction for engaging students in mastering the standards. Using this definition as a basis for translating standards into effective instruction, the SIS team is working with educators across the state to refine a flexible, research-based template that can be customized for a variety of district/school curriculum design models. The initial public draft of this template provides at-a-glance and unit overviews of a curricular “landscape.”

The first page of the template delineates a possible sequence of concept-based units (connected to the content and skill-based Colorado Academic Standards) across a course/school year, while the second page provides a more in-depth overview of one of these units. Designed to convey possible unit topics and sequencing, the template shows how Standards, Grade Level Expectations, and 21st Century Skills can be translated into curriculum that convey the big ideas that students should understand, the content they should know, and the skills they be able to demonstrate (do).

Please bookmark the Standard and Instructional Support Curriculum Project page for ongoing updates and opportunities to participate.

Arts Integration and Title Programming Resources

With the current educational focus on 21st Century and Post Secondary and Workforce readiness, it is imperative to identify key benefits and constraints of arts integration models within Title I programming. The recorded webinar session below will review 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.

Recorded webinar with downloadable materials

Curriculum Design Tools:

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For website assistance in the Arts, please contact Karol Gates.