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Intermediate Schoolers Tap Their Creativity in Final Religion Project

For their final Religion projects this year, Intermediate School students were asked to share their understanding of prophets, parables and religious passages while demonstrating their creativity and technology skills.
Fifth-graders created comics of parables, bringing together their language arts studies and focus on life lessons in Religion class. Students chose their parables and were free to illustrate the story using images they found online.

“I enjoyed learning the history of all these different parables,” said Niekon Azad ’24, who chose the biblical Parable of the Talents. “I felt like I was learning how to be an author writing comics.”

The software students used for this project, Comic Life 3, provides templates for comics. Halyn Schoenfeld ’24, who chose the Indian folktale “A Drum,” said this made it easy to focus on teaching the lesson.

“I think it helped in the fact that we were focusing on the story itself and not working to make the boxes or making sure we could draw the pictures,” she said.

Fourth-graders collaborated on a multimedia depiction of the Joseph story from the Book of Genesis. Groups read different sections of the story and combined text, images, music and transitions in iMovie to tell the tale. Students noted the differences between the biblical Joseph story and the version they would portray in the Intermediate School’s production of “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.”

“I enjoyed learning about the story,” said Tofa Akinde ’25. He added that discovering art for his portion of the video was one of his favorite parts of the project. “You got to search for the information. It was fun.”

Third-graders studied biblical and contemporary prophets this year. They then created posters about a prophet of their choice using PowerPoint. Prophets ranged from Mahatma Gandhi and Malala Yousafzai to Rosa Parks and Sally Ride.

Lila Segal ’26 said she enjoyed using PowerPoint and finding photos by searching Google. She chose Susan B. Anthony as her prophet.

“She voted when she was not supposed to vote,” Segal said, adding that, today, “girls put voting stickers on her grave in New York…she had a big impact on the world.”

Academic Technology Coordinator Anne Macdonell said while children are natural consumers of technology, they do not naturally understand how to create with it.

“Once they have to create, they have to bring in what they’ve learned in design and art class and reading and literacy to create a logical story,” Macdonell said. “They had to take very complicated parables and sophisticated moralistic stories from around the world, as well as the Joseph story, which even I felt was complicated.”

Rev. Sally Slater, chaplain to the Lower and Intermediate Schools, said she was impressed by how students chose to tell their stories and celebrate their prophets.

“The technology allowed them to use their creativity in a different way and stretch,” Slater said. “The kids were so creative in how they interpreted the stories and how they were going to show a lot of information in what pictures they chose or the dialogue box…it really was amazing how independently they did all this,” Slater said.
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St. Andrew’s Episcopal School is a private, coeducational college preparatory day school for students in preschool (Age 2) through grade 12, located in Potomac, Maryland.