BUILDING BLOCKS of a SuperHero/Person and an Avatar in Performance and Media Arts (PMA)!

We welcomed term 2 in 5th and 6th grade with refreshers on where we have been in term 1 and where we are headed to in term 2; we are halfway through the 5th Grade Comic Con Project and 6th Grade Avatar Project. Both have soft and hard skills that students need to learn in various classes and yet center in Performance and Media Arts (PMA).  

In 5th Grade, we have finished learning and embodying through performances the Hero’s Journey (creation of character through struggle), Story Mountain (plot points), and C.R.O.W., an improv concept that translates to storytelling (character, relationships (to main character), objective/want, where/setting). This was stacked on top of learning about the elements of performance which included facial expressions, body language & gestures, levels and depths of taking up open space, character and spatial relationships/connections, being open to the audience (cheating out/nose & toes to the audience), and performer neutral. They were able to laugh at their videos this week as they used all of these elements mentioned and added the hard skills of Panasonic point-and-shoot camera skills of taking photos on green screens and WeVideo online editing software skills of transforming, cropping, and keying effects.

In 6th Grade, we  learned in term 1 to embody various characters in skits to learn how to move and act in our Avatar masks that were constructed in Art. Those masks have traveled from the downstairs art lab to the upstairs shared learning space, so students can view them as decorations and they are accessible to be used in performances. We have completed stage 1 of our Avatar project by finishing the Avatar masks in Art Class, reading Binti in Humanities and talking about futurism along with SciFI Elements (by exploring “what if '' questions) in Humanities and PMA. We have launched term 2 by learning to frame photos with point-and-shoot cameras and editing green screen photos inside of WeVideo online editing software.  This set us up for success to start the main building blocks of stage 3 which include: WORLD BUILDING, CHARACTER BUILDING, and STORY BUILDING.  We built a “sci-fi world” collectively, one for each core class, and then investigated “Nick Cave” as an artist of soundsuits and “Binti” as a character in a book.  We launch character building by centering personal and social identities. We built identity icebergs to talk about what harm comes to those who are reduced to only their social identities alone. We want them to build strong characters with strong identities that are visible and visible and based on seen and unseen identities of theirs. This is similar to the Avatar masks that were based on students’ personal values.

We look forward to Avatar masks and final SciFi videos to be displayed at the Sum of Our Parts, a 6th Grade Culmination. We will bring the full “sum” of our project and identities and students will explain their full process. Let the adventure of building continue until then!