Pip: Art With Korb is back, and apparently so is the technology — which, if you’ve ever waited on IT to hard-wire anything, you know is its own kind of miracle.
Mara: Frank brings us into a week where every grade level is mid-project, assessments are landing, and the studio is genuinely humming. Let’s start with what’s actually happening in the classroom right now.
Week 7: The Studio in Full Swing
Pip: The throughline of this update is momentum meeting accountability — projects are maturing across all three grade levels at the same moment assessments arrive, and the question is whether the work holds up.
Mara: The post sets the tone early: “While we critiqued our works from 7th grade — the 6th graders are doing it this week. I will get the 7th grade done timely so that the 6th grade doesn’t fall behind.”
Pip: So the sequencing is deliberate — critique doesn’t pause just because another grade is mid-process. The assessment rhythm has to keep moving or everything stacks up.
Mara: For the 6th graders, that means one-point perspective is wrapping up — the Renaissance technique where all diagonal lines recede to a single vanishing point. The post frames it as a vocabulary-building exercise as much as a drawing one.
Pip: Which is a real pedagogical move. You learn the word “vanishing point” while you’re staring at the thing, not from a worksheet.
Mara: Seventh grade is pivoting from neurographic portraits and color schemes into soft pastels and printmaking — specifically monoprints and ghost prints. The post notes that crayons didn’t work last year, so soft pastels are the switch, with Wolf Kahn’s landscape work as a reference point.
Pip: And eighth grade is the one I’d most want to watch — stop motion films in iMovie, with the post flagging that some students are working “a bit avant garde,” and then immediately noting they probably don’t know what that means yet.
Mara: The post also mentions the new digital display, funded through a Walmart grant and hard-wired by IT, now looping student portrait work. The open question left hanging is how to keep it from drifting onto unrelated YouTube content.
Pip: A deeply relatable infrastructure problem.
Mara: The post closes on something quieter — a personal note that “being helpful and sincere is how I live my life,” alongside the reminder that staying in one’s lane has its own value. Then it’s straight back to the studio expectations.
Pip: Clay and potter’s wheels are next on the horizon — which means the 8th graders aren’t done surprising anyone yet.
Mara: Assessments, new materials, a display finally running — a lot of plates spinning at once.
Pip: Next week: find out if the potter’s wheels cooperate. They probably will. It’ll be fine.
