Curriculum
Essential Questions:
Topics and Skills:
BHS Essential Questions
This year’s school-wide essential question is: How do we build resilience?
While spending the 2019-2020 school year contemplating how to strive for real and lasting happiness, repeated themes arose. Though students recognized that happiness is not a static goal to achieve, but rather a process of growth and exploration, they also acknowledged that to engage in that process they need to build self awareness and resilience.
Grade 9: What makes up my identity and how does my identity impact my role as a community member?
Grade 10: Why is it crucial to question our assumptions and seek multiple perspectives?
Grade 11: How can I identify and understand patterns and values in a community? Where did they originate and what is their impact?
Grade 12: How can I use my skills, resources, and knowledge to better myself and/or my community?
Whole School: How do we build resilience?
With these changes, we go from (9) thinking about who we/you are to (10) understanding others' experiences to (11) identifying what works well in a community or what problems exist in a community to (12) working to solve problems or further successes.
- What makes good art good? What does “Quality” look like?
- What makes effective/successful digital art?
- How can I generate and develop good ideas for my art?
- How can I develop the skills to become a digital artist?
- Where can the skills of digital art-making take me?
- How can I say things in my art? How can art communicate meaning?
- From where can I draw inspiration as an artist?
- What are the options available to me as an artist?
- How are digital arts used today? What careers are available to a digital artist?
- How can I prepare myself for a creative future?
- What informs why, how, and what artists and designers make?
- How do artists and designers make works of art and design?
- Why and how do artists and designers present their work to viewers?
Topics and Skills:
- Macintosh Computer Platform Basics
- Developing Studio Habits of Mind
- Design-Thinking
- The Importance of Process - from concept to visual
- Visual problem-solving, planning, and process
- Reflection and Analysis
- Giving, Receiving, and Applying Feedback -- Critique
- Creative Thinking -- Visual Thinking Exercises – Improving Your Creativity
- Conceptual Drawing for Digital Artists
- Image Capture with Digital Peripherals (Digital Camera, Scanner)
- Adobe Photoshop, a pixel-based painting program
- Making Selections, Cutting, Pasting, Transforming
- Blending and Layering
- Digital Drawing and Painting with a Graphics Tablet
- Photo Editing and Restoration
- Using Filters
- Type Tools
- Animation
- Adobe Illustrator, a vector-based drawing program
- Drawing
- Page Layout
- Using Photoshop and Illustrator Together
- Using the Elements and Principles of Design to Create Visual Impact
- Visual Thinking Exercises – Improving Your Creativity
- The Great Masters of Art History
- The Masters of Digital Imaging – Today’s Professional Digital Artists -- Careers
- Media Exploration - Experimenting
- Real World Applications
- Personal Expression - Making Meaning - Visual Communication
- Portfolio Development and Presentation
BHS Essential Questions
This year’s school-wide essential question is: How do we build resilience?
While spending the 2019-2020 school year contemplating how to strive for real and lasting happiness, repeated themes arose. Though students recognized that happiness is not a static goal to achieve, but rather a process of growth and exploration, they also acknowledged that to engage in that process they need to build self awareness and resilience.
Grade 9: What makes up my identity and how does my identity impact my role as a community member?
Grade 10: Why is it crucial to question our assumptions and seek multiple perspectives?
Grade 11: How can I identify and understand patterns and values in a community? Where did they originate and what is their impact?
Grade 12: How can I use my skills, resources, and knowledge to better myself and/or my community?
Whole School: How do we build resilience?
With these changes, we go from (9) thinking about who we/you are to (10) understanding others' experiences to (11) identifying what works well in a community or what problems exist in a community to (12) working to solve problems or further successes.
