Year 8 Electives - The Arts
Dance Composition
Students study various aspects of modern dance and choreographic devices. They work in small groups to create dance pieces in a specific style of dance, acting as choreographers to groups of students from the Early Years Campus. Students need to select suitable dance elements to communicate their movements in an expressive way. They learn about the structure of a safe dance warm up and develop and deliver one of their own. They work individually to study a dance choreographer and their dance making processes, presenting a research assignment on their chosen choreographer. Students are able to work on their own technique and control of physical and expressive skills within the class. Students focus on skill development and improvement and participate in learning a class dance to perform in front of an audience.
Stage Arts
Students start by devising their own work and learning the basics of physical dramatic expression. As the semester progresses they gradually add new skills such as stage fighting, gesture, playing objective and actions, slapstick comedy, defining the performance space to create fictional worlds, developing characters, creating atmosphere and clear storytelling. As well as this they learn how to solve staging problems by working together in small groups to adapt indigenous creation myths from Australia and around the world and fractured fairy tales. Team work, problem solving, communication, negotiation and text analysis are all valuable skills that the students develop in the Stage Arts class.
Visual Art
Creativity and problem-solving are wonderful and important life skills, both of which will be exercised in Visual Art. Students will be challenged to design and create artworks using tools, materials, and processes that require careful planning and a specific procedure. Students learn to present and display their artworks effectively. They develop thinking and literacy skills by applying appropriate visual language with increasing complexity. At the end of this course, students will learn from intricate processes and to value what makes an artwork unique and gives it the human touch. Students who enrol in this subject should have an interest in Art and some experience in drawing.
Design Art
In this subject, students explore a variety of methods for producing still and moving images. Students are introduced to the Design Cycle and use digital and manual methods to plan and make their designs. They will learn skills in digital applications to create 2D designs and simple animations. By reflecting on how digital media is used to communicate ideas, students will build skills to evaluate their own work as well as 21st century design examples. Students will also maintain a website to present their digital portfolio of works. Students who enrol in this subject should have an interest in Art and Design, and must have a working iPad they can rely on and bring to every class.
Garage Band
Students participate in a variety of song writing activities designed to expose them to various styles of music and music technology. They learn about melody, harmony, chords and song structure. Overtime they begin to consolidate their understanding of using iPad software to create, edit and perform their songs. Students learn to compose music for film, mash-ups of popular songs and contemporary music as a whole.
Jammin’
Students participate in a wide variety of activities designed to improve their song writing, teamwork and technical abilities in music. These activities move to an in depth study of music notation and chart reading skills. This knowledge is applied in various class and small group band activities. Students also study well known songwriters to further develop their lyric writing skills. At the completion of this unit, students have composed, recorded and performed their very own songs.
Media Studies
Students engage with examples of classic cinema and analyse them in order to identify factors that made them critically well regarded. Students then learn to express and justify their opinions in written reviews for audiences of their choosing. Students collect a body of knowledge regarding film making and in small groups apply that knowledge to plan, write, film and edit a short film in a genre of their choice.