Our Arts inquiry: connecting and creating

With our Arts Celebration coming up in week 10, this is an exciting time in Autahi. We are connecting some different threads of our Inquiry learning and beginning to create!

You might already be familiar with our Inquiry Model.

Children in Autahi are big on Curiosity, and we encourage them to explore their world through many mini experiments and inquiries. Some of these mini inquiries are passion projects for just one or two students. We also try to find some larger topics that we can explore as a class. Fairy tales has been this kind of inquiry topic for us this year: all of our students bring some knowledge of tradition tales, and we've been able to use drama, art and philosophy to deepen their understanding. 

This term, we have also begun to explore pattern and dynamics in music. The concept of repeating patterns comes through our maths curriculum, and we've added some art into the mix.

Repeated patterns are also an important concept in music. We've explored how we can create sound patterns and also how to capture our compositions visually, by using colours. 

To create our Arts Celebration performance, we are moving into the 'sorting and creating' part of the inquiry cycle: using what we know to take action, creating something of our own.

We've been exploring the art of performance, including how, as musicians, we are in control of our voices and instruments. We can collaborate as a group to make different kinds of sounds, at different volumes, and it sounds great when we work together as a team. Having a conductor helps, and it's a lot of fun taking control of the Autahi orchestra!

For the Arts Celebration, we're working towards some compositions based on the fairytales we know best: Jack and the Beanstalk, Little Red Riding Hood, The Three Little Pigs, Goldilocks and the Three Bears. We've picked out some of the highlights of these stories and are writing some music for them that communicates what action is taking place. For example, how does the Giant sound? What about Red Riding Hood skipping through the forest? What kind of voice did Jack's mother use when he told her he'd sold the cow for handful of beans? (Clue: not a whisper voice!)

We've been working on this with instruments and also with other kinds of sound-makers (including our hands and voices).

We're also thinking about recording our ideas. How can we capture them in a visual way so that we can perform our compositions again and again? In this example, different colours indicate different dynamics: pink is a whisper, yellow is medium and red is loud. Blue is silence - also important to add impact to our performance.

Hopefully, this Blog gives a little taste of all the deeper learning that lies behind the performance we'll share with you at the Arts Celebration. We're looking forward to sharing our finished composition with you.