The Arts

In this unit, your last Music and Dance unit before high school, you will build on what you learned in Grade 7. In dance, you will create dances that respond to issues that are personally meaningful to you, use dance as a language to communicate messages about social justice and environmental health, choose choreographic forms for a specific audience or venue (including new forms: accumulation and chance), and use technology and multimedia such as lighting, projection and video to strengthen a dance's message. You will analyse how social, political and economic factors shaped dance forms such as breaking and ballet, learn how First Nations communities kept their dances alive through the years of the Indian Act bans, and relate many types of dance, including powwow, round dances, Métis jigging and Inuit drum dancing, to their roles in society.

In music, you will follow musical road maps (repeats, D.C., D.S. and codas), write the chromatic scale, read more Italian tempo and dynamic terms, conduct with both hands and sing in two parts, and compose for a purpose: jingles, video-game themes and songs for change. You will compare absolute and program music (Mozart, Smetana and Stravinsky) and the three textures, and analyse how society shapes music, from "O Canada" to activism through song and traditional and contemporary Indigenous music.

You will need a little open space with a safe floor, paper and pencils, a phone or tablet for filming (with a grown-up's permission), and a way to listen to recordings with a grown-up. A keyboard or keyboard app helps but is not required.

In this unit you will act and make art! In drama, a made-up story called "High Water" runs through the lessons: in the small Ontario town of Willow Bend, the oldest neighbourhood, the Flats, has flooded for the third time in five years, and the town council must choose a plan. You will explore this complex issue from many perspectives and test possible outcomes with a town hall meeting and flash-forwards, manipulate elements and conventions such as split scenes, flashbacks and thought tracking, negotiate the direction of the drama in and out of role, communicate abstract ideas with sound, light and technology planned on a cue sheet, analyse how media from radio to TikTok have influenced theatre, and describe how drama has made social, cultural and economic contributions from ancient Athens and medieval York to Stratford, Charlottetown and Indigenous theatre in Canada today.

In visual arts, you will explore this year's principle of design, movement, and plan pictures with compositional triangles; draw figures about seven to eight heads tall with contour and gesture lines and foreshortening, and compare perspective with other systems for showing space; build value with cross-hatching and balance pictures with visual weight; use tertiary colours, colour contrast and absence of colour in art about issues seen from multiple points of view; ask whether artistic traditions are maintained, adapted or appropriated, including First Nations, Métis and Inuit art that is living today; and look at the social, political and economic factors that shape the art world.

You will need paper, a pencil (a soft 2B to 6B pencil helps), an eraser, a ruler, a fine black pen, coloured pencils or markers, paint and brushes, scissors, glue, thin cardboard, textured scraps (yarn, fabric, corrugated cardboard), an LED flashlight with coloured cellophane, a few chairs and household props, a measuring tape, and (optional, with a grown-up's permission) a phone or tablet. Every lesson has hands-on activities, practice questions and a short quiz.

Curriculum expectations covered: Drama B1.1–B1.4, B2.1–B2.3, B3.1–B3.2; Visual Arts D1.1–D1.4, D2.1–D2.4, D3.1–D3.2 (The Ontario Curriculum, Grades 1–8: The Arts, 2009).