#rcaa

ReNEW Cultural Arts Academy 7th Grade ELA + Theatre Ms. King / Ms. Shanteler

Ms. Shanteler’s students are reading The Giver in ELA, and thinking about the elements that make up a community. We decided to develop a mock community, and have been exploring communication and listening skills, conflict management, team-building, and self-care. We are practicing these things in order to gather strategies for creating a community that reflects our shared values, and strives to be a place where our motto “Enough For All” is in place.

Here, the students brainstormed ideal values or challenges they wanted to address in the categories of Education, Jobs, Housing, Health Care, Civic Duties, and Laws. They then did a gallery walk of each other’s ideas, and either checked ideas they agreed with, or asked further questions about the ideas that needed clarification.

ReNEW Cultural Arts Academy 4th Grade, Theatre & Science Ms. King / Ms. Stewart

Ms. Stewart’s artist-scientists are working on cause & effect, erosion, & weathering. Erosion is the elements moving material from one location to another. Weathering is the breaking down of an object due to weather. 

Students took on the characters of wind, rain, ice, sun, and rock. Working collaboratively in small groups, they came up with a 24 count movement piece that showed the Erosion and Weathering effects of wind, rain, sun, and ice on a mountain. After rehearsal, they shared their interpretations with the rest of the class.

ReNEW Cultural Arts Academy 5th Grade Theatre / ELA Ms. King & Ms. Vails

Ms. Vails’ students are working on their prediction, inference, and writing skills.

Using pictures from the book they are reading, Wonderstruck”, students got into groups and discussed what they saw, thought, and wondered about their pictures. They used their imaginations and collaboratively came up with a narrative that made sense for the picture.

ReNew Cultural Arts Academy (RCAA) 7th Grade, Storytelling & ELA Ms. Renee/ Ms. Shantler 

In Ms. Shantler’s ELA class, students are learning about Claudette Colvin, the 15-year-old girl who refused to give up her seat on the bus in segregated Montgomery, Alabama nine months before Rosa Parks took the same action. Students read several articles, including Colvin’s first person account, about that day on the bus in 1955. Colvin was arrested and eventually acted as a witness on the Supreme Court case that ordered Montgomery to end segregation in transportation. 

ReNew Cultural Arts Academy 4th grade, Storytelling & Science Ms. Renee / Ms. Stewart

Students in Ms. Stewart’s 4th grade class are learning about systems, how they function, and what might cause them to not work properly. They have been focusing on electrical systems and blackouts. What causes a system to break down? How do we identify a specific problem and imagine a solution? 

With Ms. Renee, they have been working on theatrical storytelling. Using the elements of performance that include facial expression, use of body, voice for sound effects, and recently introduced props/costumes, students were tasked in small groups to put on a skit to tell the story of an electrical system failure. All of the skits had the same outcome: a blackout. Each small group, however, was given a different cause for the system failure. Examples of causes included: Animal interference, lightning, poorly installed mechanisms, or aging parts that were worn down. 

ReNEW Cultural Arts Academy 4th grade, Storytelling & Science Ms. Renee / Ms. Stewart

Students in Ms. Stewart’s 4th grade Science class are learning about systems and how they function. What does a system need to function well? What are some plausible reasons for why they can sometimes break down? They are learning to make inferences using the knowledge they already have combined with what they are learning to make an educated guess to problem solve a “system failure.”