On a typical week at The Angelo School in Brockton, Mass., Kaitlyn Mazzilli, a dance movement therapist and volunteer music teacher, walks into a kindergarten classroom singing and banging a large drum. The students in the classroom aren’t surprised or skeptical, but react with excitement. Throughout Mazzilli’s lesson, with surprising consistency for a kindergarten class, they sit rapt with attention. And by the time she leaves, one 45-minute period later, they’re usually asking her to stay to do another song.
“I have to tear myself away because I’d love to stay longer,” Mazzilli says. “But of course we have to move on to the next classroom.”
The instruction the kids get in that brief period once a week is not just a source of joy for those students. Within the field of education, it’s increasingly understood that integrating the arts into core curriculum subjects, such as literacy and math, improves students’ ability to grasp these areas of study. But asking teachers to take on this additional, interdisciplinary skill all on their own can be a major challenge.
That’s where Mazzilli comes in. She’s an instructor for ImagineARTS, a program by the South Shore Conservatory that supports literacy in schools across the city of Brockton through arts integration. The lessons provided by Mazzilli, and other instructors in the program, help students grow as learners, help teachers in providing lessons day-to-day, and even help the families of those students to bring more music into their lives.