Creative Studies (grades 4-12)

Creative Studies: Enrichment & Honors Electives Courses

The Creative Studies program provides gifted students with opportunities to explore and come to understand the effective transfer of information as it relates to creative expression. Critical thinking, innovation and media awareness are common themes throughout this curriculum. Media experts teach the Creative Studies courses. Students are encouraged to experiment, critique, analyze and contextualize the art forms that they are studying. Creative Studies promotes the analysis of creative culture and includes art, music, theatre and design. Participants delve into the structural underpinnings of media and the relationships between creation, dissemination and the re-use of art forms with both popular and traditional creative communicative tools.  Courses apply a context for innovation in the design and evaluation of the products involved in the fields of science, engineering and politics.

Course Descriptions

Honors Elective	Art & Literature of the Graphic Novel (Monthly Enrollment) Grades 6-12, one high school semester credit This 18-week course analyzes successful graphic novels and explores varied approaches to developing sequential narratives. Through reading, writing, drawing and discussion, students scrutinize this genre. Hands-on experiments break down the elements of composition, narrative flow and graphic style into manageable pieces of this complex form. In the final four weeks, students will develop a graphic novel framework with a written narrative, written and drawn character study, written and drawn context study and supporting research materials. View a video description of Art & Literature of the Graphic Novel
Enrichment	Design Studio: Communication for Change (Winter) Grades 4-6 Design requires simultaneous visual, technical and creative problem solving. Students take an in-depth look at the contemporary concepts used in graphic design in this 9-week course. Through use of traditional and cutting-edge technology, students study letterforms, posters, content development and design fundamentals to produce a poster about our environment. Course work includes virtual field trips, group critiques, brainstorming and weekly design experiments. View a video description of Design Studio: Communication for Change
Enrichment	Images & Text: Reading & Writing Workshop (Spring) Grades 4-6 In this 9-week course, we look at text and image pairings in our media landscape, with an emphasis on textual creation and visualization. Each week we analyze a contemporary text/image phenomenon and conduct a visual experiment inspired by the analysis. Students explore diverse ways of creating image and text, including writing stories inspired by art, developing artwork inspired by text and exploring illustration genres. View a video description of Images & Text: Reading & Writing Workshop
Enrichment	Studying the Visual World (Fall) Grades 4-6 CTD's newest journey into our environment explores the vocabulary of visual culture and provides a foundation for further exploration of the arts media encountered in our everyday life. In this 9-week course, class members investigate a range of art and design issues including typography (how letters are designed and how we use them), pixels, light (what is color) and sculpture (what is abstraction).  Hands-on experiments, group discussion and critique, as well as weekly 'finding' exercises round out this complete art experience.