News

Middle School Art Students Capture Life In The Lowcountry

We are blessed to live in the Lowcountry, surrounded by waterways--marshes, ocean, beaches, creeks, swamps, lagoons. Just as Jesus is our living water (John 7:37-38), the Lowcountry is filled with life because of our waterways. We have seafood, wildlife, birds and people coming from all over the world because of the water and life here. In fifth grade through eighth grade, students have been working on observational drawings from life and photo references. Learning to "see" the world around them opens new worlds for art students to study value, light, shadow and form. We began with value pencil drawings of shells, each grade with advanced complexity, and then moved into Lowcountry creatures in fifth grade (oil pastel and chalk pastel), sixth grade marshes (chalk pastel), seventh grade marshes (oil pastel) and eighth grade Angel Oak trees (charcoal and chalk). Learning how to control messy materials is a valuable lesson. In art, we aim to expose students to many media and techniques so that when they arrive in high school art and beyond, they are able to know which material will be the best solution to achieve an artistic goal. 

Distracted Driving Simulator Comes To PCA

Teen Driver Safety Week takes place October 16-22, and in preparation, The National Safety Council and State Farm partnered with local law enforcement departments and Mothers Against Drunk Driving to present “The Distracted Driving Simulator Tour”. The goal is to remind teen drivers that distracted driving can be deadly. 

Last week, this outdoor, hands-on learning experience came to our PCA campus. Director of Campus Security, Tony Poston, believed it would be a valuable opportunity for our students, “It is important to educate our students on the dangers they will come across when they are in school and when they graduate to become safe drivers in the future.”

Our Sophomores, Juniors, and Seniors rotated through several different stations which gave them a taste of what they might face on the roadways. These stations included a virtual reality Distracted Driving Simulator, giving them an up-close look at what can go wrong in various situations including texting-while-driving, impaired driving and poor road conditions like snow and strong wind. Students climbed behind the wheel of a stationary vehicle, donned virtual reality goggles, and hit the gas as a mock scenario played out before their eyes. Students tried to respond to the road map in front of them as their classmates watched what was happening on a television monitor.

At another station, students navigated their way through the twists and turns of small orange cones while wearing Fatal Vision Goggles, goggles which simulate vision impairment. Next up was a mock traffic stop where local law enforcement officers reviewed the steps of what to do during a routine traffic stop. 

Students also rotated through a sobriety testing station, where they put on vision impairing goggles and were asked to walk in a straight line in a mock field sobriety test. Finally, representatives from Mothers Against Drunk Drivers spoke with students and asked them driving trivia questions.

There’s no doubt PCA students gained a better understanding of the potentially deadly effects of distracted driving, coming away with information that will hopefully make them better and safer drivers in the future.