COSACOSA - Art Smart

COSACOSA's Art and Education initiative, Art Smart, infuses hands-on art-making activities as an educational tool across the K-12 curriculum. Working with Philadelphia students and teachers both during and after school hours, the program enhances participants' literacy, math, science and social studies learning, as well as critical thinking abilities.

Through cross-referential learning experiences, students acquire a hands-on understanding of targeted subject areas. Art Smart focuses young people on listening, observing, remembering, practicing, interpreting, and deciding -- essential survival skills from the earliest of times -- while imparting to them the academic and social competencies necessary to succeed.

Art Smart projects include Rhythmatics, practical applications of math taught through music; Natural Me, explorations of science and nature through art; and Working Together, multicultural literacy learning through poetry, photography, and puppetry.

COSACOSA's civics curriculum, Liberty is Our Responsibility, guides students to uncover the civic duties implicitly expressed in our nation's founding documents, and to write a Bill of Responsibilities for themselves. At North Philadelphia's Kenderton School, classes culminated in the creation of a larger-than-life sized Liberty Bell, featuring the children's hopes for the future -- for themselves, for our city and for our nation. The Bell was exhibited at the National Constitution Center during Fourth of July Welcome America! festivities, as well as at the National Liberty Museum and Philadelphia School District headquarters. COSACOSA's Liberty is Our Responsibility project is part of Let Art Freedom Ring!, an initiative of the Philadelphia Arts in Education Partnership (PAEP) and the National Liberty Museum.

For the past five years, COSACOSA's Art Smart initiative also has worked with PAEP on Arts Bridges, a model project building literacy through the integration of multidisciplinary arts learning across the curriculum. Funded by the U.S. Department of Education, our Arts Bridges project tracks literacy learning for 4th, 5th and 6th grade students at the Julia de Burgos Bilingual School. The project has proved successful not only in increasing students' understanding of basic literacy concepts, but also in raising standardized test scores.

Please email info[at]cosacosa.org if you are interested in bringing Art Smart to your location.

Art Smart students at the Kenderton School explore leadership and scholarship through a relay race with artist Dit Wah Deng.

Natural Me painting created by Hartranft School school students and artist Rosita Kamihira.

Liberty is Our Responsibility life-sized Liberty Bell and civics graduating class at the Kenderton School with teaching artists Sharnae Mask, Kimberly Niemela, and Ezechial Thurman.

Arts Bridges students at the Julia de Burgos Bilingual School explore basic literacy concepts though puppetry with artist Lee Fogel.