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Arts
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Boundless Imagination at Evening With the Arts
The Lower School Evening with the Arts is a chance for 4th and 5th graders in our Renaissance program to showcase the many creative, innovative projects they’ve worked on this year. From digital design to dramatic performance and everything in between, the evening highlights the unique talents of our students and their confidence to take on any artistic or problem-solving challenge.
Advanced Art
This fall, Advanced Art students studied the age-old tradition of depicting food in art. They created still-life paper collages representing the Dutch Golden Age. They created clay jars that both look like food and can be used as containers using the pinch and closed-form methods. With a nod to the Pop Art era and Wayne Thiebaud, they made paper mache ice cream sculptures. And for the grand finale, they created textile slices of pizza to form two giant pies for the show. This art looks good enough to eat!
Robotics
Our Robotics crew got serious about coding this semester. They built LEGO Mindstorms robots to precise specifications using programmable bricks, motors, and sensors. They programmed their robots to do three-point turns, used the touch sensor to back the robots away from walls, used the color sensor to move their robots along a line, and more. Our budding engineers also had a blast coding with our new Sphero Bolt robots, completing mazes using advanced sensors to track direction, speed and time.
Funtography: Digital Design
Our young digital designers decided to "go green" this fall. They began the semester by learning about typography, design principles and more before diving headfirst into all types of hands-on projects. They designed business cards, green memes, and other visual art using Canva and Pic Collage. They also made sock puppet PSA videos to encourage kids to be safe on Halloween. They finished up the semester with a deep dive into ecotourism by creating green screen commercials to encourage tourists to be eco-conscious in their travels. They were excited to show their Seesaw digital portfolios to their families!
Funtography: Digital Photography
This class involves much more than just point and shoot! Our photography students learned essential basics including camera functions, composition skills and editing techniques. Our junior photogs also learned how to care for their cameras and how to use proper etiquette when photographing others. They took photos both indoors and outdoors to create eye-catching, artistic shots along with candid photos for the yearbook. As a final project, they chose twelve of their favorite photos and made a 2020 calendar to hang on their walls at home. Impressive and professional!
Destination Imagination
Destination Imagination is a fun, hands-on program that fosters students’ creativity and curiosity through open-ended academic STEM challenges. It includes long- and short-term team projects culminating in judged, live performances. The program emphasizes independence as students work through the creative process from imagination to innovation. This year we incorporated Destination Imagination into our Renaissance curriculum. Our team, The Severn Six, will compete in the technical challenge portion of the DI tournament coming up this March. Their parents got a chance to experience some of the instant challenges they will face during the competition...with a little help from the kids!
Drama
This year the Renaissance drama crew staged "We Are Monsters," a hilarious musical that follows human kids into a monster cabaret filled with quirky monster characters. The adventurous humans uncover vegetarian vampires and rock n’ roll werewolves, gradually realizing there may be more to these monsters than meets the eye! Most importantly they discover the importance of friendship and celebrating in the attributes that make each of us different and unique. We laughed, we cried, we loved every spookily-heartwarming minute of this show. Bravo!
