A collection of moments from our Grade 7 learning community
As we continue exploring our identities as artists, we have been discussing what makes someone an ‘artist’. We brainstormed whether or not an animal could be classified as an ‘artist’ or not! According to our discussions, an artist means someone who: shows creativity, produces some type of art (painting, sculpture, writing, song, etc.), improves their skills, does art as a job or hobby. According to our definition, would the dog in the video (below) be considered an artist? What do you think?
Did you know that some historians have found evidence that sculpture as an art form has been around since 25000 BCE? Today, we had the privilege of learning the fundamentals of clay and sculpture from our artist in residence. Our classes began creating a clay model of hominid species of their choice. Later, we will glaze them and reflect on our experience. Take a look at some of our progress photos below:
What does it take to design a video game? Our Grade 7s are beginning to examine the skills and strategies that game designers use, including character creation, instructional writing/walkthroughs, mapping and level design, and more!
We began today by viewing this interview with one of the creators of the Mario series! We learned that video games have been around since the 1970s, and have continued to grow and change as technology, culture, and trends shift and change! Feel free to check out the video below:
Some questions to discuss at home:
Super Mario Game:
Information about the history of Mario:
https://mario.nintendo.com/history/
Our Grade 7s have been hard at work learning about early humans with Ms. Ramen in Socials class! We invited a artist in residence to come in and teach us how to sculpt a human skull out of clay. After sculpting, they were fired in the kiln. Then, we glazed the skulls and they will be fired a final time. We can’t wait to see the final product soon!
Some questions we suggest parents/guardians can discuss at home:
Each of our Grade 7s made a ‘piece’ of this collaborative art!
Did you know today is National Pizza Day? We celebrated by learning about different pizzas around the world, and by designing our own bizarre, delightful, or gross pizza toppings!
We’ll be creating a piece of writing and an art project based around our unique pizza creations. Check out the video below and consider the following questions:
-What is your favourite pizza topping? What flavours do you like?
-Would you try a banana pizza? Why or why not?
-Do you think every country and culture has their own ‘kind’ of pizzza?
We were inspired by the book Extra Yarn by Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen! Here is the tutorial we used to create our own ‘sweater weather’ bears for our classroom window decorations!
We’ll be making cards inspired by this video to give out to our community and our local healthcare heroes!
Feel free to watch the video and make your own version at home for friends or family!
I am so impressed with our Van Gogh inspired sunflowers so far! We used oil pastels to create layered, detailed sunflowers. Just like Van Gogh used colours like yellow, blue, and orange to represent how he felt and how he saw the world, we used colours creatively to craft these pieces of Art!
Today, we read a story based on the life of Vincent Van Gogh. We learned that most people did not appreciate his artistic talents, and thought he was too strange, too foolish, and too unique to be a famous artist. He only ever sold 1 painting during his entire life, and suffered from mental illness. But now, he is considered by many people to be one of the greatest artists of all time. His paintings are worth over $100 million. Here is a video of the ‘immersive’ exhibit in France. Maybe, one day we can see it in person!