Seventh grade brings all sorts of new adventures ... students move from having "switch" teachers and "specials" to moving from class to class for each subject. Students can also play intermediate Interscholastic League of Honolulu (ILH) sports for the first time and they have "free" lunch break where they can use their student ID cards to charge lunch - in the dining room or at the snack bar.

The curriculum changes for these students, too. For the first time, seventh graders take a language; Spanish, French, Japanese, Chinese, and Latin are offered. Students also have the opportunity to choose an elective. The class of 2011 was given seven elective choices this year: shop, home economics, web design, news journalism, acting in front of a camera, robotics, and moviemakers. All students take one semester of art and then two of the seven electives offered make of the remaining trimesters.

Students who choose moviemakers write, direct, perform in, film, and edit their own short movies and commercials. They cover basic techniques in movie making, film acting and script development. Macintosh computers are used for film editing with iMovie and musical score creation with GarageBand.

Creative expression and imaginative problem solving are just two of the skills developed in this course. Don't you wish that you had the opportunity to explore movie making when you were in middle school?