Media Arts

FOUNDATION

Beginning in Term Four, our Prep students have been exploring how Media can be used to educate as well as entertain. Students have made connections to their Literacy lessons for understanding how the television shows they watch can be fiction or non-fiction, just like the books they read at home and school.

Using Ask the Storybots as a mentor text, students are presented with a question and view media to seek answers. Class discussions are held for students to share the knowledge they acquired during the lesson. 

YEAR ONE

Having concluded our unit on using sound to enhance narratives, Year One students are exploring how visualising is an integral part in creating media works. Students have made connections between the visualisation they perform in Literacy when writing or reading, and how this skill is scaffolded in Media to create works with images. As communicators, students participated in a read-aloud of Little Red Riding Hood and shared with their peers how they imagined the various details of the text. Through class discussions, we realised that as creators, there is no limit to how our stories can look. 

YEAR TWO

Beginning in Term Four, the Year Two students have been investigating advertising. Students made connections to the techniques used by advertisers and those they employ in Literacy during persuasive writing.  Students identified the target audience of different commercials and analysed what made them appealing to that demographic. As a class, they compared advertisements for the same product across multiple decades, examining what techniques are still being employed and how advertisers have changed the way they target their audience. 

Taking on the role of advertisers, students have taken part in toy design, with the objective of developing a product that would entice a target audience (other children) to purchase it. 

YEAR THREE

In Year Three, students have begun exploring how they can create a narrative using only still images. They have explored the many different mediums to tell a story, from verbal retelling, to writing, music, and moving image. By investigating still image storytelling, students are learning how to condense/summarise a narrative in as few images as required. This puts a focus on analysing what visual information is contained in a frame and what it communicates to an audience. Moving forward, students will use their photography skills learned in Term Three to take photos and create still-image narratives of their own.

YEAR FOUR

The Year Four students are excitedly putting together their "A Day in the Life of a Saltwater Student" montages. Students have filmed their shots throughout the school and are now in the editing stages of production. 

Students need to be visually minded, considering how to best communicate their ideas with an audience, without using dialogue. When editing together their final piece, students will develop their knowledge in transitions, sound effects, pacing and background music.  

Moving forward, students will begin a unit analysing and interpreting media works.