​This week's student art features portrait head drawings and still life painting by eighth graders, sixth and seventh grade pillow sculptures, and seventh grade Tinkercad and colored pencil drawings.  To create their head drawings, students gridded photos with the Sketchbook app on their iPads. They made corresponding grids on sheets of card stock.  Students observed the visual information in each block of their photos and recorded their observations in the corresponding squares on their paper grids.

​Fifth grade art students have been creating virtual 3D models with Sketch Up for Schools computer-aided design (CAD) software on their Chromebooks.  These photos show students' airplane design projects.  As with all of the CAD projects that we do at Saint Peter, students built their complex structures by creating, manipulating, and combining basic shapes.  The photo of Lucas Mora's jet construction steps shows how he executed sections of his aircraft, which he combined to complete his jet.   Although students were taught the same general construction method, each student's jet was visibly different.  Steps included the wing set, the fuselage, and the landing gear.   After creating and coloring the jets, students were able to duplicate and rotate their aircraft, and create other structures for their compositions. 

This work helps our students develop structural reasoning capabilities.  It also affords students the opportunity to work creatively in a medium that is similar to what architects and engineers use for planning structures that will be built.             

Second graders have recently been drawing "Color Wheel Flower Gardens".  In this exercise, the dominant flower in the composition has petals that show a 6-part color wheel. The petals have the three traditional primary colors for painters (red, yellow, and blue) and the secondary colors (orange, green, and purple).  The secondary colors appear between the primaries used to make them.  Brown appears in the central circle of the color wheel flowers because various types of brown can be obtained by mixing the three primaries in different proportions.  Black is in the very center of the color wheel flowers because it can be obtained by mixing the 3 primaries in proportions of equal strength. Students used their imaginations and mainly colored pencils to develop these artworks.  

​This week's student art features Tinkercad models of mini-golf lanes by 7th graders (a joint art and math project), 8th grade human figure sculptures, and the 6G robot exam.

The 6G art class is shown below in the video, 6G Robot Exam SPCS, running robots that they build and programmed. Working in groups of 3 or 4, students built their EV3 Lego robots according to specifications. They programmed their robots with the EV3 Classroom iPad app to use color sensors to drive along the edges of black lines. Each team had to develop unique code to accomplish the goal, because each team's track design was different.  The challenge was to program the robots to follow a line to each of 3 target objects, pick up each object, throw it into a "catcher box" with a forked lifter arm, and return to the base area. As you can see in the video, all seven teams achieved success. Excellent work, 6G!

Mr. Bell designed and directed this robot project.  In math class, Mrs. Wilson collaborated on the project by teaching the 6G students to measure pieces of cardstock that they used in the construction of the "catcher boxes". 

Kindergarten art students traced cardboard rectangles to draw the main shapes of the bodies of their giraffes.  By arranging the rectangles to create the general shape of the animals, students learned that simple shapes can be used to make more complex forms.  Tempera paint was applied with cotton swabs and fingers.

As a culminating activity for their work with robotics construction and programming, the 7W class is shown running their robots in this video. Working in groups of 3 or 4, students built their EV3 Lego robots according to specifications. They programmed their robots with the EV3 Classroom iPad app to use color sensors to drive along the edges of black lines. Each team designed their own track so their robot could follow the line to each of 3 target objects. The goal was to program the robots to pick up each object, throw it into a "catcher box" with a forked lifter arm, and return to the base area. As you can see in the video, all eight teams were successful. Great job, 7W!