Expressive Arts & Music | Pacific Primary

Expressive Arts

The Expressive Arts Program, created three decades ago by Elyse Jacobs, has helped children learn to identify their feelings and to express themselves through art and puppet play. The program allows children to work with a wide variety of artistic materials as a tool for “open-ended” artistic expression, problem solving, social skills and emotional intelligence.

The program provides bi-weekly experiences for small groups of children to visit and make art and play with puppets. The specialists scaffold the children’s work and help each child reach the next level of independent creativity. Children use tape, beads, ribbon, colored wire, fabric, and an endless variety of other “found materials and loose parts” to create art.

The Expressive Arts Program originated as a peace-education program that used puppets to help children learn basic social and emotional skills. This focus remains a core concept of the program, as do the puppets. Several puppets, including Turtle and SuperSeaweed, have nurtured generations of Pacific Primary students. Teachers frequently use puppets to explore difficult social issues that inevitably arise during the school year: making and maintaining friendships, entering play, inclusion and exclusion, fears and anxieties, appreciation of differences, and personal loss.

Pacific Primary’s Expressive Arts teachers

A child creating a sculpture from play dough, beads and spaghetti

Music & Movement

Music is an integral and vital component of the learning process at Pacific Primary. In 1986, Heidi Tzortzis established an active and rich music-making program teaching children the basics of music through song, movement and rhymes. Today, our Music and Movement specialists Kevin Gerzevitz and Kate Offer continue to offer a comprehensive and wonderful music program for our children.

The program is founded on Orff Schulwerk, an active approach to teaching music based on the premise that children are innately musical and love to sing and dance. The Schulwerk philosophy, developed by composers Carl Orff and Gunild Keetman, embraces music, movement and speech as equal partners in awakening the creativity and musical potential of the child.

Children sing songs, chant rhymes and poems, play and share musical instruments (both small percussion and easy-to-play barred instruments like xylophones) and follow or lead expressive movements in daily music class. Rhythm games build patterns, listening, and turn-taking; dance and expressive movement build body awareness; and songs from all around the world deepen children’s understanding of other cultures.

The community comes together for storytime, weekly circle games, sing-alongs for children, parents and teachers, and folk dancing every Friday afternoon, a tradition since 1984 that all families are invited to attend. This end-of-week ritual symbolizes our strong feeling of being one big family; one favorite traditional dance incorporates “holding hands and never letting go.”

“Peace, peace, peace,
Peace the whole world over,
Building friendships, sharing our love,
Hold my hand and circle the earth with peace, peace, peace.”

One of Pacific Primary’s goals is to teach children that they can make the world a better place. We sing our Peace songs nearly every day and end folk dance and sing-alongs with one of our favorites.

Pacific Primary’s Music & Movement teachers

Sing along at home

Our songbook

Lyric sheets for the songs we sing at school: from peace songs to pumpkin patches.