Specialists Programs

Specialist Programs Term 2

Visual Arts

Year Prep/1/2

Visual Art classes for the Junior classes will focus on Painting, Collage and Textiles this term. The students will investigate arranging, manipulating and attaching materials to a surface. They will be exploring the different types and textures of paper, cardboard, natural and recycled materials. The students will develop their basic paper skills (eg. tearing, cutting, overlapping shapes, scrunching, fringing) and the safe use of scissors. The students will explore the colours and textures of textiles and begin some basic weaving .

Year 3/4 

Year 3/4 students  will focus on Painting and Drawing during Term 2. The students will explore and experiment with visual conventions such as line, shape, colour and texture to develop an individual approach to a theme or subject matter. The students will be introduced to shade/tone, complementary and contrasting colours. They will investigate a variety of drawing implements (eg. ink, pen, pencil, textas, crayon, pastel) and be using different surfaces. We will be exploring a variety of painting techniques. 

Year 5/6 

The Year 5 /6  students will focus on Drawing and Painting. Students will  be introduced to tertiary colours and to techniques for creating shade, tone and tints. The students will work with  complementary and contrasting colour wheels and monotone painting. They will use a variety of drawing tools (eg. ink, pen, pastel, charcoal ) and explore different surfaces (eg.cardboard, paper, fabric, foil).  

Deirdre Cosgrave

dcosgrave@sjmitcham.catholic.edu.au

Italian

PREP

This term the students will revise the greetings and feelings that are commonly used in Italian, for example: Come stai? Sto bene grazie, sto male, sono stanco/sono stanca, sonoconfidente, cosi cosi, and sono triste. The students will also learn to say the colours in Italian and identify various objects and their colours. They will participate in numerous games and songs to learn the numbers to ten.

Year 1/2

This term the students will listen to, view, read together and explore the history of famous Italian Landmarks, such as - The Colosseum, The Leaning Tower of Pisa, The Trevi Fountain, Venice and its amazing gondolas and masks. The students will learn to make comparisons and connections with what they know and they will develop a better understanding of Italy’s most famous sights.

Year 3/4

This term the students will participate in Italian cultural experiences to help them explore facts about Ancient Roman history and Pompeii. They will learn about the myths Romulus and Remus and La Bocca Della Verita. They will go on to explore facts and enhance their appreciation of Italian history by participating in class activities about the Colosseum, The Leaning Tower of Pisa, and Pompeii.

Rosetta De Amicis

rdeamicis@sjmitcham.catholic.edu.au

Chinese

The Year 5/6 students will be introduced to the following vocabulary and topics in Chinese; answering questions about a family member, practise forming words with the ‘e’ and ‘u’ sound, name family members and describe the colours they like, name the number of friends they have using ‘ge’ and recognise familiar word order in Chinese sentences.

In Culture, they will learn about different types of Zongzi, the one Child Policy, what it is like to be a single child, the benefits of large families, the role of grandparents and other family members and compare a 12th Century Chinese and Western painting of a town. They will also take part in one activity related to Chinese culture; making a Chinese handscroll.

Ange Crowe

acrowe@sjmitcham.catholic.edu.au

Performing Arts

Performing Arts Term 2 Overviews

This term in Performing Arts, all students will continue with the main topic of Drama and developing group work and analysis skills. By mid term each class will begin planning and creating  their Production pieces. As you know, Production will be held on Thursday 19th August and our theme is Circus. Stay tuned for more information. 

Preps

Students will continue to learn the foundations of Drama, elements such as using movement and gestures to convey meaning and using a confident and expressive voice while speaking. Using a variety of different children’s books they will work in small groups to create frozen pictures to reenact the story. It is important to teach the skills of a ‘good’ working group and we often model this in class and discuss at the end of each session who was a good leader in each group and who showed good listening skills and who contributed some good ideas.  

1/2 

Students are still working on the book, Lost and Found and in small groups they are recreating the story through frozen pictures. They will also choose their favourite character and explore how this character might be feeling. This exposes students to feelings of empathy and allows them to see what it is like for another person.  We will also look at how we can show different emotions while using a body bag (a coloured lycra bag that students fit into like a small sleeping bag and they move inside it to make shapes and convey emotions) and listening to different styles of music to guide this.

3/4 

Students are exploring the use of how we show emotions and they will be doing this while using a white facial mask. They use movement, gestures and appropriate music to perform a number of different emotions. They will extend this by creating a short story that will be told through the 3 M’s: Mask, Music and Movement. We continue to develop their group work and analytical skills after each class by asking who we think was performing well and why. Students must be able to give a reason why they chose that person.

5/6

Students are finishing off the filming of their Monologues and will then take these voice skills to the next unit of work. We will be looking at Roald Dahl’s novels, The BFG and The Witches and working in small groups they will recreate a scene from the play version of these novels. They will make shadow puppets of the characters and they will use torches to project the light onto the shadow puppets, while using voices and sound effects to bring the script to life. We will continue to work on our group work skills and analysing how each member of the group contributes and also who is performing well and why.