The Fine Arts Program
The Fine Arts Program at St. Anthony of Padua offers students the opportunity to engage in the visual and performing arts, enhance their communication skills, and enrich their appreciation of the Arts that communicate truth, goodness, and beauty.
Visual Arts
The visual arts curriculum at St Anthony of Padua mirrors the objectives of the provincial curriculum. It strives to encourage students’ artful habits of mind through engaged visual arts learning. The curriculum seeks to capture the language, activities, and experiences unique to those who paint, draw and appreciate visual arts through the ages and across cultures.
The curriculum supports the notion that all students, in becoming educated citizens, can develop an artistic mindset in all aspects of their daily life, both during and beyond their school years. The visual arts program here at St Anthony of Padua School connects skills, processes, and knowledge cultivated in students’ arts learning experiences with lots of opportunities for application.
The artistic habits of mind developed here at St Anthony of Padua engage students to:
- explore with artistic curiosity
- create with artistic intellect
- reason through considerations and possibilities
- reflect on choices and imagining opportunities
- communicate ideas and perspectives
- document artistic growth and understandings
- connect with themselves, artists, artworks, and the world
- expand artistic capacity through perseverance
Music
In Music class, students explore a variety of music skills, from learning about music history to music theory, creating their own songs, appreciating various music genres from around the world, as well as developing personal connections with music that enables students to think critically and reflectively on how music impacts their lives.
Drama
Students from K-7 take Drama classes once a week. By focusing on social-emotional skills and community building activities in class, students explore a variety of drama skills: voice, character, movement, creative problem-solving, and improv. Various disciplines in Theatre Education are explored from theatre history to mime, puppet and mask-work, monologues, stage design, and more.
The students also have the opportunity to engage in diverse theatrical experiences such as annual productions, frequent field trips to musicals, plays, and children's theatre, as well as participating in acting workshops.
All students get to showcase their talents in the annual Christmas play, the Fine Arts production in the Spring term, a talent show at the end of the school year, and the annual Speech Arts Festival. For the Speech Arts Festival, St. Anthony of Padua students participate in choric speech, Bible reading, poetry recitation, and individual speeches. For students who love to sing, St. Anthony’s Intermediate Choir performs at the annual Christmas concert hosted by Aberdeen Centre and participates in choral music festivals in the Spring. Students are also taught hymns of praise and worship that are shared with our parish community during School Masses.
We take the arts seriously here at our school. Throughout a student’s career at St. Anthony of Padua School, it is our aim that through his or her engagement in these Fine Arts opportunities, he or she will be able to create, draw, paint, act, think, speak, sing and play for the greater Glory of God during the constant pursuit of truth, goodness, and beauty. These opportunities allow our students to build self-confidence, improve communication skills, learn to work with a team, and gain a lifelong appreciation for the Arts.