January was a busy month for our enrichment classes. At the beginning of the month, several of our enrichment classes moved to a virtual model in order to avoid cross-contamination between classes as the COVID rates went up nationwide. We are excited to be returning to our in-person learning in February.

Scroll through this post to see what our students have been up to in our Enrichment classes this winter.

Art Enrichment

Mr. Beven Barnhart

This semester all students in the art enrichment program have begun to work with acrylic paint.

Our Lower Elementary cohort has explored mixing colors, using different brush strokes, and they have started to experiment with what it means to compose a painting of their own.

The Upper Elementary community has been exploring the use of different brush strokes in order to make landscapes with their acrylic compositions, with the caveat of only using the color’s white and blue in an effort to add shades of value to their pieces.

The Adolescent Community has also been composing acrylic landscapes, and while they are using only two colors to do so, they are experimenting with white and an additional color of their choosing.

Physical Education

Mr. Jeff Arenberg

All students begin PE class with age-appropriate yoga and calisthenics-inspired warmups.

Music Enrichment

Ms. Jasmine Mays Robinson

Lower Elementary students have been learning to observe, describe, create, and respond to music using body percussion and classroom instruments, and to use familiar words and concepts as tools for understanding varied rhythms. The students have enjoyed using tonic sofa syllables to learn melodies and using rhythm sticks and shakers to practice reading quarter and eighth notes from the staff. Each class is currently in the process of putting together a wintery piece entitled “January, January” for Glockenspiel, Orff, Percussion, and Sandblock. We are also visiting virtually with Maestro Karl from the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra (a school-wide community favorite) to learn about instrument families.

 

Having previously studied the basics of music notation, dynamics, and instrument families, our 4th and 5th graders are diving deep into the impact music has on our world. How can we use music to tell a story, change hearts and minds, or make a difference? This class has studied the tenets of Rossini and Prokofiev, both historically renowned masters of storytelling through music. Now, they are making connections between these 19th and early 20th century principles and the way music influences our perception of character and the way we interpret action in film. They are then using this information to create their own storylines and their own musical backdrops in order to learn to influence others through music.

 

6th graders, along with the Adolescent Community, are gaining the skills necessary to attain independent musicianship. Our first quarter was focused on learning to play the piano/keyboard and the guitar, read music from the staff and recognize a guitar chord chart. Students enjoyed earning badges for completing levels of their “Piano Bootcamp.” We are now in phase two of our long-term songwriting initiative, which started with utilizing parodies in order to begin writing lyrics using rhythmic patterns and maintaining rhyme schemes. As a closing activity to this portion of our unit, students are given the task of writing out a portion of a song in musical notation on the staff and assigning their own (parodied) lyrics. Our next step is to analyze music in order to understand the parts of a song and understand the purpose and benefit of using literary tools when writing lyrics and deciding on song structure. By the end of this project, students will be able to write their own songs with musical notation.

Sra. Marcela Daley