Arts Mark Award
The Shires has recently submitted its application for the gold standard Artsmark Award – the highest Artsmark Award. If all goes well, the award should come through in 2010.
Although The Shires was doing much in both the care and education settings to involve students in arts projects, the process of applying for the gold Artsmark Award has raised the bar higher and has helped us to set new challenges.
Music has always been one of our real strengths, but we are planning to branch out by introducing students and staff to the delights of learning how to play steel drums. If the response is as enthusiastic as we predict we will purchase our own drums and make this music opportunity one of our new passions. We will also be taking part in national sing-along sessions and hopefully joining up with other schools for shared productions.
To help our development in drama we have booked a company to work with staff and students focusing on the use of puppets to bring stories to life. We know this will be motivating for the students, and puppets will certainly help us to articulate some of the concepts our students find most difficult to understand such as emotions and the difference between fact and fantasy.
We are going to take a brave step and venture into the realms of sculpture and ceramics. These are two areas where we will benefit from the expertise of artists in residence, and we anticipate that the withy sculptures we intend to focus on as an art form will eventually take pride of place in the new sensory garden. As part of our Artsmark application we have committed ourselves to taking the students to more art galleries and we are very much looking forwards to increasing our own knowledge in the process.
We are very fortunate to have a qualified dance teacher on our staff, and we aim to continue to build up our repertoire of steps and movements whilst not losing the spontaneity our students currently show. We try to link dance into our termly topics – for example learning Tudor dances as part of our history topics, and dancing round the Maypole at the start of May. We would very much like to develop a more multi-cultural dimension to our dancing and so have firm plans to work with a group of dancers who can teach us all about ‘Bollywood’ dancing.
All in all, the process of making the Gold Artsmark application has been illuminating and thought provoking. The programme of planned arts events will dovetail naturally into our 24 hour curriculum provision and its success will be assured by the total commitment of all staff to giving our students the best learning opportunities available.