Growing Artists in the Woods

Our four, five and six year old Fine Arts program is a specialized enrichment program to introduce children to the exciting world of Music, Drama, Movement, Art and more. Your child will experience a Kodaly based music program using the voice as the principle instrument. The teachers will invite the children's response to music through movement, props and the visual arts. Children will experience many art mediums with open-ended activities that will encourage discovery, exploration, experimentation, creativity and originality. Through drama, the teachers will facilitate and guide the children as they arrange and re-arrange ideas, ask questions, explore possibilities and make decisions.

Fine Arts Program - Tues/Thurs afternoons from 12:45 - 3:00 pm $100.00 per month

SPECIAL COMBO - Pre-K PM/Fine Arts for $215/month, save $25 for 5 afternoons a week!!

This class has a maximum of 16 students, with 2 qualified teachers. Children must be 4 years old by December 31 of the current school year.

PLEASE NOTE

Woodvale Playschool is a registered non-profit program of the Woodvale Community League. As such we require parents to obtain a community league membership in their community for the upcoming school year.

Our School is a Parent Cooperative school, without roster or cleaning days and has one scheduled Bingo. Parents must provide a $50.00 cheque to help cover cleaning costs and a cheque for $200.00 that will be returned to them after they have worked their scheduled Bingo. $45 non-refundable registration fee.

For more information, call the Cindy at 780-474-5885 or e-mail registrar@woodvaleplayschool.org.

What can children learn through fine arts?

Through drama, they learn:

about themselves, their unique interests, qualities, and dreams
about others - for example, in how they relate to the characters of a story (asking themselves, "What would I do in this situation?" "How might I feel if I was that character?" to understand others ("I wonder why he did that" or "What might she do next?")
empathy
ability to work as a group towards a common goal
to exercise their imaginative and symbolic thought, for example children will be invited to think of props to represent items they need for stories they act out
develop receptive and expressive language skills, listening and turn-taking, increase vocabulary
about relationships and roles in family and society
enjoyment and a love of literature

Through the visual arts, children learn:

to experience their world with all their senses
creative expression of their own ideas. Often children's ideas and feelings about the world and their experiences in it are more easily expressed through their drawings, paintings or sculpting than through talking.
aesthetic awareness - noticing aspects of art and beginning to recognize what their own preferences are.
to represent their thinking - symbolic representation
two-dimensional and three-dimensional art experiences
tactile, hands-on experiences such as clay or papier-mâché
motor planning, how to implement their ideas into the real world

Through music and movement children learn:

spatial awareness, awareness of their body moving through space and moving with others in space
distance
speed (tempo)
dynamics and timbre (volume and distinct musical sounds created with their bodies or musical instruments, children will also have opportunities to hear and respond to a wide variety of music)
rhythm and beat, for example, being able to tap a rhythm while hearing another rhythm going on at the same time
musical form and phrasing. For example, children can make up a movement for each phrase of a dance depicting the phrases that are alike and different. Or children feel the phrase by "drawing" a rainbow in space with their finger for each of the four phrases of "Star Light, Star Bright."
pitch and melody. The children will begin to learn solfege - hand signals that represent notes of the musical scale do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do.
to develop the musical/rhythmic and bodily/kinesthetic intelligences (Howard Gardner) by using their bodies or instruments to imitate, create and move to music
creativity (Children can change words to familiar songs, add verses or make up their own melodies and rhythms)
speech development, development of language sounds (for example, "Wee, Willie, Winkie" or "Silly Sally" by Audrey Wood)
to lay a foundation for music literacy (reading music) - visualizing patterns in music (up or down, left to right, rhythms.) For example, pictures of hearts represent the basic beat of a song
singing games that foster cooperation and fun
how music can inspire visual artistic impressions, for example, painting a picture while listening to music depicting a storm or peaceful forest scene
music appreciation, how music can inspire and move us
how music can relate to storytelling, poetry or drama as an enhancement to the story, to help create an emotion or depict an action or character, for example, in Sergei Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf.

Fine Arts and Your Child's Development

Physical Development

Children will have opportunities to develop fine and gross motor skills, coordination and spatial awareness.

Social/Emotional Development

Children will learn: self-awareness and expression through working together towards a common artistic goal; acceptance and belonging through group endeavours; and how to participate in ways as unique as each one of them.

Cognitive Development

Children will be encouraged to think creatively and divergently, respecting the ideas of others - that it is OK to be different and have different ideas. Through open-ended questions and an atmosphere of acceptance, higher levels of thinking, reasoning and problem-solving will be prompted by the teachers.

Creative Development

Thinking "outside the box" as we ponder "what if" questions, expressing themselves through movement and music, visual and tactile art, and drama, children's innate creativity will be valued.

Language Development

Through poetry, story-telling, and listening and songs, children will develop their awareness of the rhyme, metre, and cadence of spoken language. Their vocabulary and language sounds will be enhanced through stories, songs, dramatization of familiar stories and stories of their own creation.

Music

The children will experience a Kodaly-based music program. Using the voice as the principal instrument, children will introduced to pitch, melody and solfege hand symbols. They will learn to recognize and duplicate beat and rhythm with their bodies and with percussion instruments. The teachers will invite the children's response to art music through movement, props and the visual arts.

Drama

Drama is a form of expression providing children a creative outlet. They interpret and create stories through language, emotion and imagination. The teachers will facilitate and guide the children as they develop their ideas.

Movement

Music is all around us every day, whether it be rhythmic tap of a woodpecker. the melody of the doorbell or the chaotic sound of traffic. Stories and music evoke thoughts and feelings in children which they often translate into movement.

Visual Art

Art is an open-ended activity that encourages discovery, exploration, experimentation, creativity and originality. Through their drawings, paintings and sculpting, children reveal what they know about their world, their thoughts and emotions and the rich world of their imaginations. We will integrate some of the art experiences with the drama and music components of the program.

Fun

Children are playful by nature. We will endeavour to provide a safe, accepting and exciting environment where each child will grow and blossom. Their laughter will fill our days.

NOTES: Classes run from September to June inclusive. There is a registration fee of $100, $50 of this goes towards September fees. There is also a deposit cheque of $200.00 - once parents have completed 1 Bingo, their cheques will be returned to them. A non-refundable cleaning fee of $50.00 is also required.

For more information, call the Shahneen at 780-628-5607 or e-mail registrar@woodvaleplayschool.org.