Have you noticed Ms. Appel and her MICA art interns in your area of the building recently? We are working on Arts Integration - instruction which authentically combines art and other subjects to deepen student understanding of content from both subject areas!

Recently, Ms. Kwon and Ms. Williams worked with Ms. de la Mar to design a unit for her 1st period PreCalculus GT class in which students learned how to interpret the qualities of a sound wave through trigonometric graphs. Students were asked to record and bring in sounds from their daily lives, which were then played into a CBL unit connected to a graphing calculator. As you might imagine, we saw a wide variety of graphs - the sound of typing on a keyboard gave us very different results than the sound of a younger sibling telling a story! Students also created instruments to match musical tones by adding and subtracting water to a bottle, then blowing into the bottle while checking the resulting graph for tonal accuracy. A bottle chorus then performed “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star!” Finally, Ms. Kwon and Ms. Williams engaged students with examples of artists who make work about or reacting to sound, then students chose one of their recorded sounds and created a visual response based on the qualities of that sound.

Click here for a picture of the student project!