Academics

The Arts

Experience in the creative process is essential for all students. In the arts, this process involves solving problems with skill and imagination, discovering new questions, and producing new ideas, objects, or interpretations of existing works. Learning in, about, and through the arts develops each student's capacity to make meaning from experience, respond to creativity, and contribute to society.

Guidelines For the Arts Curriculum

1. The arts are essential to the education of all students.
2. Students exercise and display multiple intelligences through the arts.
3. Understanding of human growth and development shapes effective arts curriculum, instruction, and assessment.
4. Comprehensive and sequential arts programs encourage students to make multicultural and interdisciplinary connections.
5. Authentic assessment in the arts is designed to demonstrate what students know and can do; it provides a model for assessing all complex learning.
6. Creating and sustaining high quality arts programs require partnerships among all faculty and between the school and community.

Ring Mountain believes that all students can discover that learning in, about, and through the arts is a demanding and creative process that can lead to a profound sense of understanding, joy, and accomplishment. We teach that in all cultures throughout history human beings have expressed insights about themselves and the world around them through dance, music, theatre, and visual arts. Our teachers understand that sequential experiences in "the practice of creating" enable learners to understand the arts and to express themselves in ways that do not depend solely on the written or spoken word. Consequently, we educate students to appreciate ideas and emotions conveyed in sound, image, movement, and words, and to speak the languages of the arts.

Dance

In every culture, dance uses movement to express and communicate myths, rituals, stories, beliefs, and information to others. Education in dance trains the student to use the body to convey meaning through the language of form, shape, rhythm, energy, space, and movement. Dance communicates in ways that are physical, visceral, affective, symbolic, and intellectual. Dance includes forms that are social and theatrical, sacred and secular, popular and esoteric, historical and contemporary.

Music

Music is a unifying force in civilizations throughout the world. Music gives order to sounds and silence, and communicates through melody, harmony, rhythm, and movement. Music education trains the student to use the human voice and a variety of instruments in individual and ensemble performances. Music includes forms such as folk, popular, band, and orchestral music, gospel music, jazz, opera, and musical theatre.

Theatre

Theatre is an art form concerned with the representation of people in time and space, their actions and the consequences of their actions. Theatre education expands the ability to understand others and communicate through language and action, and provides a unique opportunity for integrating the arts, linking dance, music, and visual arts elements in performance and production. Theatre includes acting, improvisation, storytelling, mime, playmaking and playwriting, directing, management, design and technical theatre, and related arts such as puppetry, film, and video.

Visual Arts

Visual arts and design education develops students who can perceive and shape the visual, spatial, and aesthetic characteristics of the world around them. Visual arts and design include the traditional "fine arts" of drawing, painting, photography, printmaking, and sculpture; the design fields of handicrafts, industrial, textile, graphic, architectural, and landscape design; and urban, regional, and rural planning. Visual arts and design is a continuously evolving field that also explores the expressive potential of technologies such as film, holography, video, and electronic art.

Examples of the Performing Arts at RMDS:
Currently, our students have the opportunity to take part in three large performances each School year.  We produce an “extravagant” cabaret style show at a local theatre.  This show includes many aspects of the Performing Arts including, solo and choral singing, dancing, clowning, magic, and instrumental performance. 

We also put on a very high quality Musical in the Winter.  Both the Cabaret and The Musical are optional performances.  Between the technical crew and the performers, we have had over two thirds of our school involved in these wonderful shows.  Rehearsals for both of these productions take place after school and on weekends.

The Spring Sing Concert is an all-school showcase of music that we work on in music classes.  Students perform with their classmates.

All students have Drama, Dance and Music classes every week.  Below are descriptions of our curriculum and focus in these areas.

Drama
Students practice and develop skills and techniques related self awareness.  They are challenged to notice their sensory functions, and to pay attention to their surroundings.  Children work on improvisation through games and skits and benefit from solving “problems” on the spot.  They are learning about stage presence, and how to use their “whole body” to express an idea. .  Students do a great deal of work in small groups developing scenes together and then performing them for the rest of the class.  During this small group time, students rotate the role of director, which develops both leadership skills and the art  of “being led” by a peer.  Children will move into a deeper development of a performance piece later on in the year using scripts and costumes.  Through this project, they will tackle character development, more stage etiquette, and memorization skills.

Dance 
Class time is divided between yoga and warm-ups, choreographed routines of different styles, and free expressive movement during which we interpret magical scenarios together to music.  Dance is a chance for us to both experience music together as well as focus on body awareness.   Free expressive movement is often done using props such as stretchy lycra tubes and bags which give children either the chance to move more anonymously or bring the group together, depending on the activity.  We do units focusing on dancing in many different styles.  This year, we have covered Hip Hop, Square Dance, Middle Eastern Circle Dance, African Tribal Dances and a bit of Ballroom Dancing.

Music
Students learn about music across cultures and across time in order to develop their listening skills and appreciation of music.  Instruments are introduced both for playing and identifying by sight and sound.   We will be playing xylophones and Orff Marimbas  all year long.  Most of the repertoire for middle school features three-part, polyrhythmic patterns which the children learn to play together. This is an incredible opportunity for children to learn how to play music in a group, how different melodic and rhythmic lines fit together, and how EVERYONE can play music.  Elementary school students play simpler melodies and rhythms and do a lot of work with Rhythm sticks, beating out different patterns in order to begin to understand note values and how they work together.  The class Marimba Band, and percussion activities are both  true precursors to playing in an orchestra or singing in a choir.  In music class, there is also a large emphasis on singing together, and most music theory is learned through song.  Children will learn about dynamics, ascending and descending scales, different vocal qualities and how to achieve them, cannons, harmony and more.