Teaching & Learning

Drama

Drama offers a chance to play, imagine, create and explore.

Dramatic activity is a natural part of children’s lives; even before starting school they start to engage in various forms of make-believe play. Children love to move, imagine, and interact with others, and in drama classes this is what they do. Our classes witness the development of creativity, teamwork, negotiation, self-confidence, empathy, communication, and leadership.

Drama classes include a wide range of experiences: dramatic play, improvisation, role-play, test interpretation and theatrical performance, structured around movement, speaking, and responding to one another. In Drama, characters, ideas, stories and other worlds come into being.

Drama builds – in a rewarding and engaging way – teamwork. The collective project can only be realised when the class learns to work cohesively, supporting the development of negotiation and listening skills. Differences must be resolved, and compromises made to achieve a meeting in the middle, actively contributing to the cultivation of social competencies and confidence in students.

Innate to Drama is the ability to express different points of view, while learning that others often have a different understanding or interpretation to our own. In the production of stories and scripts, Drama assists in growing literacy skills through extending vocabulary, as well as writing and reading competencies.

Drama, through the creation, exploration and production of stories provides a non-stressful and non-confronting means for students to develop a sense of their own identity, and to explore meaningful (and challenging) situations that have real world parallels.

Most importantly, it’s really fun!

Music

Music class has a strong emphasis on singing and movement. Using a combination of games, activities and rehearsed repertoire, classes are an experience of lively energy. A variety of folk songs and original compositions are used to develop rhythmic awareness and vocal confidence. Elements of the Kodaly and Dalcroze approach to music pedagogy have been fine tuned to suit our class structure of small mixed age groups.

Younger groups build foundational skills with lots of short, simple songs and rhymes. Musical games are another frequent feature of class. Older students build on these foundations with additional listening activities and more complex active games – often involving lots of chasing and laughter.

Activities are devised to encourage a joyful experience of music. Musicianship skills are developed through both singing and listening. Listening activities form the basis for small group creative tasks, with the pieces chosen showcasing classic, traditional and modern repertoires.

Each week also includes a whole school choir session, to which parents and preschoolers are welcome. The end of term concert allows for a showcasing of the music program and offers the children an occasion to perform.

There are also regular soirees which offer the children an opportunity to perform, with soirees stressing participation and progress; while also offering the younger ones the opportunity to witness the development of skill that comes from regular practice.

Sport

Sport is an integral part of the FCS experience, reflected in it being the most timetabled activity. This prioritising of Sport goes beyond the clear physical gains: fitness, flexibility, hand-eye coordination and ball-skills. Although, given the amount of time spent on sport, these are all fairly well developed in our students. FCS’s commitment to sport resides in its contribution to the goal of raising of children who are good sports.

Sport classes involve a range of games, both formal in informal. In some classes, the intention is to have some silly fun, while at other times the class may focus on a specific skills or the learning of the rules of a game. Sportsmanship is always a priority, achieved in tandem to the children gaining fitness, flexibility and coordination.

Our experience is that Sport classes offer a real, fun and easily accessible format in which children may acquire and practice character traits. Sport provides a genuine setting in which attributes of character and interpersonal skills are readily developed. Teamwork, effort, overcoming adversity, persistence and the ability to be a good winner (and loser) are readily experienced and practiced on the sporting field. These are important life skills: not giving up when things are (feel) tough and the game (your situation) is going against you are qualities that will certainly be needed in the adult world. Likewise, life will certainly throw up circumstances where continuing to support your team (family, friend or workmate) in the face of difficulties and setbacks is a much needed (and appreciated) quality.

The sporting field is a child-appropriate introduction to tackling and overcoming challenges: the weather will sometimes be far from optimum (wet and muddy or hot and sweaty), a skilful teammate absent and you’ve just been tackled to the ground. The ability to remain positive, get up and continue is part and parcel of sporting endeavours.

Sport also plays significant dividends in the classroom in terms of focus and application, something that has become more important in recent years as children’s homelives have become more sedentary and increasingly screen-based. A large Spanish study of early secondary school students with ADHD found their school’s incorporation of a daily run led to a dramatic impact reduction of symptomology . The FCS experience mirrors this finding. Our experience is that a decent proportion of primary school age children have a notable energy supply, and so are much more able to concentrate and remain on task when they’ve burnt some of it off. Sport, as a frequent endeavour at FCS, in addition to increasing fitness and building character traits, also promotes focused, efficient classrooms. Children are simply better able to concentrate on academic work after they’ve been out for a run on the oval.

Sport, like all classes at FCS, is run in different age configurations: like-age and mixed-age groupings. When the grouping is older like-age students, the focus is generally on the acquisition of specific skills and the learning of the rule of a specific game: basketball, netball, swimming, rounders and soccer are school staples.

FCS is also involved in inter-school cross-country running, with Middlies and Biggies being taken for regular runs over a number of weeks in preparation for the race. The school, despite its small size, regularly sees a number of highly placed runners, with progression to Division, Regional and even State competitions a yearly phenomenon. The ‘overrepresentation’ of our students in these competitions reflects our students ‘have a go’ disposition and general persistence. That is, while there is no question as to whether the children will be puffed out in these races, what sets the FCS student apart is their continuing to push themselves when short of breath. Our observation of many other schools doing cross-country would seem to indicate that slacking off is the norm, and having a go the exception. This is a sad state of affairs for both the individuals involved and our society more broadly.

In all games, our children are expected to participate and try their best. The small size of our school means that every child gets to play and contribute in a way that is not so readily available to a student in a larger school. All children from years three to six regularly represent their school in interschool sport, reflecting the FCS ethos of active, positive participation.

This ethos of full, active participation is something of a conceptual challenge to many children who join our school part-way through their primary years, who appear to have adopted an ‘optout’ and ‘I don’t/can’t’ self-concept. The high-spirited, cheerful nature of our sports classes sees these students, over time, letting go of these negative mindsets and starting to enjoy the fun of active participation.

Our mixed-age (vertically arranged) sports classes prioritise games that are fun for all ages and where effort counts for more than acquired skill. Mixed-age classes regularly see the older children given the dual role of participant and teacher/supporter of the younger children. The endearing aspect of these games ‘captained’ by the older children is the premium they place on inclusion. From time to time the older children are given the responsibility to select, organise and run the game or activity.

It is always pleasing to see the younger children's excitement when they win a race for the first time or tag an older child who they’ve put considerable effort into chasing and catching. Our experience is that social competencies are accelerated in these mixed-age classes, as they naturally lend themselves to the emergence of leadership, teamwork and sportsmanship.

Teamwork is magnified in mixed-age groupings as the younger children are happy to cooperate with, and follow, the instructions and example of the older children. Likewise, the positive manner in which the older students respond to wins and loses demonstrates, and so teaches, sportsmanship. Mixed-age classes have also been noted by the sport staff to contribute to a more mature and conciliatory experience. Our thoughts here are that it is socially inappropriate for a twelve-year-old to either gloat or complain when there are five-year-olds involved in the game, while the younger children are less inclined to whinge or sook in front of the older children. Mixed-age classes appear to bring out the best in all.

In returning to the question of fitness, an oft heard comment of new students offers an insight. Newbies frequently sharing that their legs are tired at the end of the day. We take that as a badge of success.