Italian / Visual Arts
The Italian and Art program at St Monica’s is a combined lesson undertaken once a week. It creates enjoyable opportunities where students are engaged and immersed in the Italian language and cultural experiences. Students are able to develop a greater sense of self and their own cultural background while developing an understanding of Italian culture.
At St Monica’s we offer a skill-based and stimulating visual arts program. Each child has an art lesson each week where students experience a range of visual arts activities including painting, printmaking, collage, sculpture, textiles and ceramics. The emphasis is to provide students with key skills for each component. Children learn to work with ideas, develop their artistic skills and respond to art works. St Monica’s also works towards presenting a biennial Art Show (school operations guidelines permitting) where all students have the opportunity to exhibit their work for their parents and visitors.
Physical Education
St Monica’s offers a comprehensive and active Physical Education program that allows children to participate at their own level of competency, whilst striving to reach their maximum potential. Each Year level participates in a 60 minute Physical Education lesson each week involving fitness, ball handling and minor and major games. Our program at St Monica’s offers all children the opportunity to participate and develop an appreciation for a variety of sports in a safe and inclusive environment. Sports like Tennis, Soccer, Hockey, Badminton and Basketball are some of the favourites amongst students and through the Sporting Schools Australia funding and other local programs students frequently enjoy engaging in sports clinics with professional coaches. Physical
Education at St Monica’s also enables students at all entry levels to participate in different sports and games while fostering a lifelong enjoyment for being physically active while learning the fundamental skills of locomotion, ball control, throwing, tracking, kicking and striking as per Victorian Curriculum.
Music
St Monica’s School has a long tradition of valuing and celebrating the Performing Arts. This is reflected in the students’ joyful approach to dance, drama and music making, and also in the way music is embedded in our school community events and assemblies. Our goal is to help build within each student a lifelong appreciation of the Arts, and research confirms our belief that involvement in music also encourages the development of:
- creative thinking and problem solving
- language skills
- self-esteem and self confidence
- personal and interpersonal skills
- perseverance and self-discipline.
Classroom Music Program
We offer a rich and vibrant music program where the children participate in a weekly lesson provided by a specialist music teacher in our well-equipped, dedicated music room. The focus is on enabling each student to express themselves through music using their imagination, music skills and knowledge. The sequential program incorporates the Orff concept of music education where the students are guided through a range of activities including:
- Singing and chanting
- Moving and dancing
- Playing both melodic, non-melodic and electronic instruments
- Developing an understanding of different cultural, historical and stylistic musical genre
Library
Every child has a library lesson each week, where they listen to stories, browse the collection and can borrow books from our fantastic collection. The focus of the library is for St Monica’s students to love reading and to learn how to do amazing research.
In 2nd and 3rd Term every child completes the Premiers Reading Challenge, and our Year 6 students also enter the National History Challenge, which is an Australian wide competition which acknowledges quality research.
Over the years St Monica’s Year 6 students have won many State and even Australian prizes in this competition. In recent years we have some new library shelving and furniture, and the library looks bright and interesting!
Kitchen Garden- Coming 2023…
St Monica’s is currently exploring reimagining our Kitchen Garden program as we believe it is about pleasurable food education. It provides students with the opportunity to grow, nurture, harvest, prepare, cook and share delicious, nutritious, seasonal foods. It is anticipated that our school garden will undergo a significant rejuvenation in 2022 thus providing a program that will enable students a hands-on experience in the process of growing and preparing food, as well as encouraging students to consider environmental sustainability and healthy food choices.
We envisage that students will work together to create vibrant, healthy meals which are based on the fresh ingredients from our garden. Being outside in nature and tending to our gardens is a huge part of our program, we love getting our hands dirty. Students learn how to care for our garden through planting, weeding, watering, mulching, fertilising and composting. The kitchen garden program encourages teamwork, critical thinking and a love of the outdoors as well promoting a sense of harmony and community engagement.
Changes are sometimes made to the Specialist Day Timetable. Families are informed of Specialist Day changes in the school’s newsletter when this is required.
