After a restful Thanksgiving break, the Elementary Studio jumped right back into Session 3: our 3 week sprint! The overarching question this session, “How do people in different communities use their voices?”
The Heroes will explore this question by traveling the world in the Cartography Quest. To break it down, there are 3 parts to this Quest: voyages, the World Fact Book, and a hand-drawn map.
- Weekly, the Heroes will go on a “voyage” where they explore a specific topic (like longitude and latitude)
- Daily, the studio will travel to a new continent and Heroes will explore 1 country in-depth (completing a World Fact Book page for that country)
- As a continuous project throughout the session, the Heroes will draw a map of a continent by hand
Should we have a pet in the studio? In Writer’s Workshop, the Heroes will choose a pet, conduct research, and then write a persuasive pitch. Their goal is to convince the community to choose their pet.
This Writer’s Workshop is a Hero-driven workshop in that, each Hero will be responsible for developing a timeline to complete the work: research, outlining, drafting, revising, and practicing the pitch. This is a great opportunity to build time management and organizational skills, but even more importantly, it empowers the Heroes to truly own their writing!
In Civilization, the Heroes are playing “Take Over the Nations!”, a new game that follows the Story of the World. Each Squad is in charge of a country and will have to make strategic decisions for their country. There are helpful hints in the history each week.
How do you perceive color? Ms. Jeneen, our Art Guide, led a launch on this topic. She introduced the Heroes to ideas like color can express feelings and why primary and secondary colors co-exist. They also saw a world class example in Joseph Albers work where he extracted pigments from objects and turned them into abstract art. Throughout the session, the Heroes’ challenge is to experiment with color!
All in all, it will be a busy session. And we haven’t even got to our character trait of the session (kindness) and the community service projects the Heroes are devising in Project Good! Look for more on that next week.
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