Arts

Drama at Kingston explores how we express ourselves physically and vocally. In creating, students explore the use of facial expressions, gestures, movement, posture and vocal techniques to convey emotional or cultural meaning to both characters and stories. Students are exposed to a variety of dramatic forms including creative movement, impersonation, improvisation, mask work, mime, musical, role play, pantomime, puppetry, re-enactment, scripted drama, and skit. In responding, students experience a wide variety of scripts and stories from different times, cultures and places and, where possible, access live theatre performances and presentations. Students have opportunities to present their creative work to audiences, to witness their peers in performance and through this become critically aware audience members.

Design at Kingston is used to describe practices that have been more traditionally described in education as "art, craft and design". Students are exposed to a broad range of experiences that illustrate the field of visual arts, including architecture, ceramics, collage, costume design, drawing, graphic design, film, illustration, industrial design, installation, jewellery, land art, mask making, metal-work, painting, papermaking, performance art, photography, printmaking, sculpture, set design, textiles and woodwork. Throughout Years 1 - 6 at Kingston, students develop their individuality and collaborative understanding as performers, designers, creators and directors.

Music in the PYP is divided into two main strands of learning:

Creating
Students use their imagination and musical experiences to organise sounds into various forms that communicate specific ideas or moods.

Responding
Students are given the opportunity to respond to different styles of music, as well as to music from different times and cultures. Individually and collaboratively, students have the opportunity to create and respond to music ideas.

During their time at Kingston students will have the opportunity to engage in a broad range of music experiences including, singing, listening, playing percussion instruments, improvising, composing using traditional and graphic notation, body percussion, performing, dancing, harmonising, classifying and analysing sounds and recording.

The development of listening skills, an important aspect of all learning, is constantly reinforced in music classes.

All students are involved in a collaborative year group performance once a year. In lower years this involves singing with choreographed movements. In Year 4 and 5 the students add the challenge of playing pitched and unpitched percussion instruments to accompany their own performances. In Year 6 the students further their performing arts skills by singing in harmony, acting and dancing in a musical production.

There are also additional opportunities for interested upper primary students to audition and share their musical skills, performing for the Kingston community at events throughout the year.