• teach and enliven existing curriculum in a challenging and innovative way.
• bring teachers, students, parents and community together. 
• focus on the process of learning to write, to reason, to create.

Storytelling, music and creative writing residencies often focus on genres of stories: how and why stories, tall tales, fairy tales, etc. Chris tells many examples and then students work in groups or collaboratively to create their own, often presenting their work for their peers in other classes or publishing these works for the library.

Recent popular themes have been animals, dinosaurs, the environment, a local celebratory landmark, or the dramatization of a favorite book.

Local history, cultural traditions, social studies, the environment or landmark celebrations figure prominently at this level. Writing skills have advanced significantly so that complex prose, poetry, songwriting and interviewing is possible; confidence in performance is dramatically increased.

Recent residencies have included: grandparents' oral history days (fourth grade students heard the stories and retold them in story and song). Fifth graders worked with Chris to write a new school alma mater. Art, music, and classroom teachers collaborated with Chris to create a claymation animated video based on the historical stories children had written about their town.

Students researched the Civil War, Westward Expansion or the Erie Canal and then wrote and performed their own program on what they've learned, written  and created.

For middle school students there is really no topic too daunting to approach through the combination of literary, musical and performing arts. They can be excellent writers and collaborators, terrific storytellers and songwriters, and they are strongly motivated by activity based projects with challenging themes.

Recently sixth graders chose, learned, dramatized and performed Greek myths for the rest of their school. Through the songs, stories and tales of the Dust Bowl eighth graders have worked with Chris to design newspapers, articles, letters and even obituaries chronicling that time. Seventh graders have recreated the era of the Erie Canal through research, site visits and musical theatre scene creations and performance.

Arranged and developed through collaborative efforts of individual arts-in-ed representatives and High School teachers and administrators. Often based in two or more departments (music and history, arts and foreign language, English and social studies, etc.)

A recent residency focused on the civil rights movement of the 50's and 60's through protest songs and writings. Constitutional freedoms, prejudice and equality were all examined through recreations of historical scenes. All 11th grade English classes participated in the creation of a Saturday Evening Post-style magazine about the politics, art, culture, poetry, music and popular crazes of the 1950's.