Fine Arts
The Fine Arts Program at St. Michael’s Episcopal School is comprised of art, drama, general music, chorus, dance, band and strings. All grades, K-8, participate in visual arts and music classes. The visual arts classes are designed to foster an appreciation for fine artists and their work, to explore a variety of media and artistic techniques, and to emphasize the principles of art. This program nurtures the unique creative abilities of each student by providing developmentally appropriate classes for every grade level. The music classes study various great composers and their compositions, aspects of music theory, singing, movement and various instruments. Students are given the opportunity to share their talents with their classmates during the regular music classes, and through the performing groups offered.
Middle school students have the opportunity to audition for the annual drama production. Two choirs are offered at St. Michael’s: the Lower School Choir and the Middle School Ensemble. Mr. Brian Rollins, band director at Trinity Episcopal School, provides beginning and intermediate band instruction to students in fifth through eighth grades. A semester of dance is taught as part of the sixth grade curriculum. Drumming and beginning guitar are included in the seventh and eighth grade music curriculum. The String Ensemble is open to students who have taken a minimum of one year of private instruction on an orchestral stringed instrument.
St. Michael’s celebrates the fine arts with a week- long festival in the spring including a choir concert, an art show and the drama production.
Ten Lessons the Arts Teach
By Elliot Eisner
The arts teach children to make good judgments about qualitative relationships.
Unlike much of the curriculum in which correct answers and rules prevail, in the arts, it is judgment rather than rules that prevail.
The arts teach children that problems can have more than one solution
and that questions can have more than one answer.
The arts celebrate multiple perspectives.
One of their large lessons is that there are many ways to see and interpret the world.
The arts teach children that in complex forms of problem solving
purposes are seldom fixed, but change with circumstance and opportunity. Learning in the arts requires the ability and a willingness to surrender to the unanticipated possibilities of the work as it unfolds.
The arts make vivid the fact that neither words in their literal form nor number exhaust what we can know. The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition.
The arts teach students that small differences can have large effects.
The arts traffic in subtleties.
The arts teach students to think through and within a material.
All art forms employ some means through which images become real.
The arts help children learn to say what cannot be said.
When children are invited to disclose what a work of art helps them feel, they must reach into their poetic capacities to find the words that will do the job.
The arts enable us to have experience we can have from no other source
and through such experience to discover the range and variety of what we are capable of feeling.
The artsʼ position in the school curriculum symbolizes to the young
what adults believe is important.
SOURCE: Eisner, E. (2002). The Arts and the Creation of Mind, In Chapter 4, What the Arts Teach and How It Shows. (pp. 70-92). Yale University Press. Available from NAEA Publications. NAEA grants reprint permission for this excerpt from Ten Lessons with proper acknowledgment of its source and NAEA.