Grades: Preschool–8
Best Format: Weekly partnership / 4–8 visits
Focus: Theatre, storytelling, improvisation, creative movement, and ensemble work
About Karen
Karen Twight brings nearly two decades of experience in performing arts to the classroom. She has created and directed musicals, plays, talent shows, puppet shows, and theme-based performances for students from kindergarten through middle school, often weaving in history, social studies, or language arts.
Karen’s teaching is deeply inclusive, shaped by years of working with typically developing, neurologically diverse, learning-challenged, and at-risk students. She believes drama is a powerful counterbalance to the passive pull of devices that increasingly occupy children’s time.
Her approach activates imagination, communication, and collaboration through movement, storytelling, and ensemble work. She believes drama excites the brain, sparks creativity, and gives students a dynamic way to practice problem-solving, expressive language, and confidence.
Whether staging a folk tale with puppets or guiding students through a theme-based play, Karen helps young people experience the joy of storytelling and self-expression and discover how energizing it feels to think, move, and create together.
What Students Can Explore
Karen’s workshops engage students through movement, imagination, collaboration, storytelling, improvisation, ensemble work, and hands-on dramatic play. With more time, students can build creative confidence, create original work, collaborate more effectively, reflect on their learning, revise and improve their work, complete larger projects, prepare for performance or exhibition, build stronger classroom relationships, and develop independence.
Students get the most from Karen’s teaching when: “They are actively engaged by moving, imagining, collaborating, and creating together in a classroom, where students learn through storytelling, improvisation, ensemble work, and hands-on dramatic play.”
In Karen’s classroom, students: “Find a place where, as neurotypical and/or neurodivergent learners, they can take risks, explore characters, and discover new ways of thinking.”
Karen focuses on helping students: “Activate their imagination, use their voices and bodies with confidence, and engage in learning that is energetic rather than passive.”
Students leave with: “The skills to walk away knowing how to think creatively, solve problems through movement and storytelling, and connect with others in meaningful ways, skills they can carry far beyond the classroom.”
Teaching Experience
General education classrooms, inclusion classrooms, self-contained special education classrooms, resource rooms, Highly Capable programs, alternative education settings, outdoor learning environments, and community-based learning.
Learner Needs Karen Can Adapt For
Students with IEPs, students with 504 Plans, neurodivergent learners, students with physical disabilities, emotional or behavioral supports, mixed-age classrooms, beginning learners, and advanced learners.
Best Learning Environments
Traditional classrooms, gymnasiums, auditoriums, outdoor spaces, flexible or open spaces, small-group instruction, whole-class instruction, and teacher co-teaching.
Helpful Information + Teacher Support
Class size, teacher learning goals or curriculum connections, information about student interests and prior experience, a brief planning conversation before the visit, and teacher support with classroom management.
Contact + Artist Information
Email: ktwight@yahoo.com
Phone: 530-917-0341
