Performing Arts

Year 3 - Oliver
Year 5 - Matilda
Year 6 - Matilda

We are passionate about providing our children with the greatest opportunities possible to succeed in their lives, and our values of Care, Aspire and Achieve underpin everything we do. Our values-based curriculum not only covers a broad range of knowledge and skills but also allows opportunities and experiences for our children to discover and pursue their own particular interests and passions. A crucial part of this is our Performing Arts curriculum, which every child will experience.

We believe that Performing Arts play a hugely significant role in helping children to develop their creative skills, as well as other essential life skills. Expressing themselves through performing arts helps children to develop such skills as creativity, communication, empathy, self-confidence and collaboration. Most importantly, Performing Arts allow children to be playful and creative and the activities are exciting and fun – making learning both enjoyable and memorable. It is impossible to watch our children in these lessons and not have a huge smile on your face when you see, and feel, the excitement in the room.

Our Performing Arts curriculum is all about self-expression, exploring alternative options and embracing individuality, which allows children to develop self-confidence and belief in themselves. Within this open learning environment is the opportunity to develop and nurture new skills and experiment with ideas. The children enjoy a range of activities including singing, dancing and acting, which are delivered by our specialist performing arts teacher, Anne Marie. Anne Marie is a Performing Arts practitioner, teaching for theatre schools such as Footlights Theatre school and Starlight performing arts CIC. She is also a specialist practitioner for the Artis Foundation, who are pioneers at integrating performing arts into primary education and physicalising school topics. All performing arts lessons support school topics and are taught in a way that promotes child led learning. This enables children to harness their own ideas and creativity within a structured format, whilst also working to support the school curriculum by physicalising school topics and bringing them to life.

In addition to the topic-based lessons, all children experience  more skill-based sessions, where they work towards a performance piece (usually a musical) and learn script, songs and choreographed dance routines. These lessons help children develop a variety of skills such as listening, problem solving, spatial and group awareness, voice projection, confidence, ability to harness their own creativity, ability to give and take direction, resilience at taking constructive feedback, resilience and the understanding that 'drilling' work over and over will produce high standards, respect for one another's ideas, respect for each other when performing. Their achievements are celebrated with a performance delivered to an audience packed full of smiling parents and the sense of pride and achievement the children show is simply phenomenal!

While Performing Arts allow children to develop creative passions and confidence, they simultaneously teach children language and communication skills, helping them to communicate with others with confidence which we know is a skill they will need throughout their lives. Children learn to trust others and build relationships as they learn to share their thoughts and ideas with confidence, to listen to others and to learn about respect for one another. With improved self-confidence and self-belief, which becomes a natural pathway for children to go on to master many more skills that will support them for life and become empowered in whatever path they decide to follow in their future.