Arts

Posted on Jan 11, 2011

Arts

Dramatic Arts

Drama encourages students to express themselves creatively while also developing listening and speaking skills, cooperation, and the ability to analyze texts. The middle school drama curriculum focuses on three areas: ensemble and exploration, performance, and active observation.

Each student engages in drama exercises that focus on ensemble technique, an approach to theater that emphasizes group success. Students develop physical and vocal skills for public presentation and learn to collaborate effectively. Additionally, students are encouraged to watch their peers perform with the eyes of acting students, giving them practice in the process of constructive feedback. By the end of each year, every student in the school will have acted in a short recital piece for a school assembly.

The fall and spring plays at the middle school are separate from in-class instruction. These performances are for serious drama students who make a full commitment to a more rigorous rehearsal schedule. Casting is based on focus, interest, commitment, and collaboration. Interested students are welcome to participate in the action behind the scenes as stage managers, set and prop builders, and sound and lighting operators.

Music and Performance

Music is studied to nurture the spirit, to touch that part of the child that is creative and expressive, and to know the satisfaction of connecting with others in a common effort. Music ensembles perform often at school events and for local audiences. As students learn to sing, dance, and play music together, they grow in ways that deepen their commitment to each other and increase their joy of music.

Students receive weekly music instruction, integrated with curricular studies in all grades. In addition, Prospect Sierra has two orchestras, two jazz bands, a rock band, and a recording band. Both the middle school orchestra and the recording band make a CD in a professional recording studio at the end of each year. There are also middle school electives in vocal music and an after school Beginning Instruments Program.

Visual Arts

Prospect Sierra’s art program encourages creative problem-solving and reinforces the importance of community. Weekly art instruction helps students recognize the importance of personal experiences and gives students opportunities for self-discovery.

The art room is a lively place, with a variety of projects in progress by students in all grades. This space encourages a community of artists who exchange ideas and appreciate the creativity of others. The artist-teachers act as specialists who bring their specific art interests to the program.

Fifth Grade

Fifth grade artists begin the year painting in the styles of famous artists, such as Vincent Van Gogh, Wayne Thiebaud, Georgia O’Keeffe, or Jacob Lawrence. Students learn about the cultural significance of art through projects inspired by the Days of the Dead and the murals of the Ndebelle. They build sketching skills as they learn to work from references, stretching their imaginations to create dragons, word illustrations, and chimera in mixed media. Students learn to depict textures and complex color in oil pastel drawing portraits of animals.

Some of the technical skills they explore are:

  • Drawing in proportion
  • Depicting shading and highlights
  • Ceramic sculpting techniques
  • Painting with watercolor and tempera

Additional projects reflect service learning projects and humanities topics and have included poster design, recycled paper making, and traditional Americam crafts.

Sixth Grade

Sixth graders continue to build skills in drawing and painting realistically, while creatively expressing themselves through open-ended projects. They study and draw realistic fish from life, paint them in fantastic color schemes, and finally sculpt fish from wire and beads. Students explore who they are and how they perceive themselves through mixed media self-portraits and computer generated art. Sixth grade artists draw their own shoes and decorate them with invented patterns textures, designs and colors. Other subjects may include nature, carousel animals, slogan poster design, drawing the human figure, and world culture crafts.

Seventh Grade

The main focus of the first half of the year for 7th grade artists is the use of pencil for drawing and shading the human face. Teaching techniques to make things look realistic will give most students the confidence to return to a more expressive and playful artistic style later on. They learn to use a range of sketching pencils, tissues, stumps, and various erasers, to create highlights, shadows, surface textures, and edges. Guided drawing lessons using mirrors, photos, and other students’ features as references offer opportunities to appreciate the beauty of ethnic differences.

Students choose a famous person they would like to draw and create a detailed portrait, working from a photo. Next they create small colored pencil drawings of animals, experimenting to create colors and build textures by layering pencil strokes. Additional projects may include painting a landscape and sculpting in clay.

Eighth Grade

Eighth grade artists start the year honing their realistic drawing skills by working on still-life drawings of vintage tools and watercolor paintings of long-stem roses. Working from life offers students an opportunity to share their unique perspectives while still learning to depict three-dimensional forms and the effects of light. Eighth graders also explore their identities, as well as new artistic styles and techniques through a series of self-portraits. They explore looking at a familiar subject, a black and white photo of a face, in a whole new way by drawing the highlights with white pencil on black paper.

A favorite project of the year is abstract painting while listening to jazz music. Students strive to represent the rhythm and emotions of the music through the use of color, emphasis, contrast, and repeated elements. In conjunction with their humanities final project, students learn about and create teaching posters on civil rights movements.

Electives

Electives are offered once a week for fifth and sixth graders and twice a week for seventh and eighth graders. A variety of arts and crafts electives are offered each trimester and have included: jewelry making, basketry, henna hand art, comic book art, fantasy art, drawing animals, clay, painting on canvas, recycled crafts, printmaking, general crafts, paper mache, textile arts, doll making, felting, computer arts, and more.