Strategies for integrating the arts into STEM lessons

The purpose of this paper is to examine how arts integration in the STEM disciplines can become a vehicle for engaging students in a deeper understanding of STEM curricula. There is much discussion in the educational world that the acronym STEM should evolve into STEAM, as the arts add the creative thinking, artistic design, social-emotional maturity, and collaborative skills needed by students to enter the workforce of the 21st century. This project includes a synthesis of the related literature, and a collection of five lesson plans that effectively integrate the STEM disciplines into the four different categories of the arts: visual, music, dance, and theater. Each lesson can be considered as a seed to help inspire teachers on how they can achieve arts integration in their existing science and mathematics curricula.