Creative Minds Unleashed!

The Arts Department at The Sage School in Foxboro, MA is proud to participate in Creative Minds Unleashed!

The Sage School is an independent school for academically gifted children.  Our Arts Department is dedicated to a philosophy of constructivist teaching and learning, which we measure through our students' creation of unique and personal demonstrations of their learning.  We emphasize the ambiguity of "right" and "wrong," the development of lifelong work habits of mind, and the paramount importance of process over product.  A point of pride at The Sage School is that most all arts work at The Sage School is student-developed.

Below are three examples of entirely original student work:

Dance
Egyptian Pyramid
choreographed and performed by Ellie, Noa, and Kacey; Grade 5

Dance notation for Egyptian Pyramid:

“Our dance was inspired by Egyptian movements.  We incorporated those movements with softer movements.  All movements were powerful and sharp.  The transitions were soft.  We enjoyed making the piece.  If we could change one thing, we would make it longer.” 

Kacey, Ellie and Noa

Teacher Note: Kacey, Ellie and Noa have been studying a form of dance notation called The Language of Dance which is based on Labanotation.  In this assignment they had to choreograph a dance that was four counts of eight, which is about thirty seconds of movement, that incorporated a variety of notation symbols. The dancers collaborated on the choreography and then notated the movement using the symbols they had studied so far.  As you read in their statement, they titled the dance after the unique and stylized movements.  

Danielle Bazinet

Visual Art
The Sports Player
conceived, designed, and built by Cole and Benjamin; Grade 1

"We made a person who plays both football and tennis. We got this idea because one of us made a football field and the other made a tennis court and then we wanted to come together to make a project. The first thing we did was make the body with paper towel tubes. It was harder than we thought it would be."

Cole and Benjamin

Teacher's note: Cole and Benjamin had been working side by side for several weeks on their respective sports arenas. They were constantly gathering ideas and giving each other suggestions. When they both completed their work early, they decided to work together to build a life size sports player that could physically stand in between their two projects in the art exhibition. It is rare to see such young children work on such a huge scale, and with such independent drive. They debated the merits of various materials, and used their knowledge of attachment options in inserting tubes into each other and cutting the ends for "feet" to more securely attach the tubes to a flat surface. They designed the water bottle holder, paper mached the football, and sculpted the tennis racquet out of a wire coat hanger. Perhaps most challenging of all was figuring out how to hold the arms up in an action pose and finding the point of balance so the figure could stand on its own.

Emily Stewart

Music

African Lake

Composed and performed by Happy and Rebecca; Grade 4

"We decided to make the piece that we made because, one, Happy had this piano piece that she had stuck in her head, so she took out some chords from it, and added some things to it. The song inspired her because she thought that it was dark, and thin at the same time, meaning that the sounds were low and soft, and thin by not so dark that people don't like it. Rebecca just wanted something to do, and she liked bongos. Rebecca didn't really have an inspiration, she was just messing around with the xylophone, and we joined forces to make a beautiful song. The instruments we used were bongos, Rebecca played that. I played the electric piano. The instruments went together really well. Some troubles we ran into were the bongos fitting in, because sometimes they were just making a random beat. We fixed that by doing this: making the bongos faster to fit in with the xylophone and making the bongos have their own part in the song, rather than random bongos in a piano song."
Happy and Rebecca

Teacher's Note: Happy and Rebecca worked on this song for several class periods. It went through a handful of revisions, as the girls had to translate the chords that Happy had in her head to an accompanying part for the bass metallophone. Throughout their revisions, they also continually updated the percussion ostinato, at first beginning with a steady beat (which you still sometimes hear in parts of this recording) and advancing to more complex rhythmic patterns. This piece was created following the introduction of two concepts: chord progressions and rhythmic ostinati. The perseverance the girls showed on this project, the ability to take previously known material (the chords Happy had stuck in her head) and integrate it to create something new, and the collaborative manner in which they worked are all notable.
Jill Hogan