Teacher(s):

Course Description:

This course integrates two or more of the arts (dance, drama, media arts, music, and visual arts), giving students the opportunity to produce and present integrated art works created individually or collaboratively. Students will demonstrate innovation as they learn and apply concepts, styles, and conventions unique to the various arts and acquire skills that are transferable beyond the classroom. Students will use the creative process and responsible practices to explore solutions to integrated arts challenges.

Resources Required:

This course is entirely online and does not require nor rely on any textbook. The materials required for the course are:

• A scanner, smart phone camera, or similar device to upload handwritten or hand-drawn work
• A digital video camera, a web camera, or similar device to record and upload video recordings
• A computer microphone, smart phone microphone, or similar device to record and upload audio recordings
• Drawing materials such as pencils, paint, pastels for a variety of visual art activities
• Room to move about when planning a short dramatic presentation and experimenting with some dance steps
• Ability to interview a local artist

Teaching and Learning Strategies:

Education in the arts involves students intellectually, emotionally, socially, and physically stimulating a wide variety of learning styles and increasing a student’s learning potential. Hands-on materials and activities challenge students to move from the concrete to the abstract. The arts can be enjoyable and fulfilling, but they are also intellectually rigorous disciplines involving the use of complex symbols to communicate. Arts education provides a way of perceiving, interpreting, organizing, and questioning. Through the arts, we can record, celebrate, and pass on to future generations the personal and collective stories, values, and traditions that make us unique as Canadians.

The arts broaden young minds and exalt our spirits; they help us understand what it is that makes us human by validating our commonalities and celebrating our differences – which is so important in a multicultural society like Canada. Artistic expression involves clarifying and restructuring personal experience. It engages students in perception, production, and reflection. Learning in, through, and about the arts involves using the mind, body, heart, and soul to achieve intellectual, social, emotional, and spiritual well-being.

Students will be engaged in reading, writing, viewing and identifying images, watching some drama and dance performances, writing a script, making journal entries, performing a dramatic presentation, listening to music, planning dance steps, accessing print and internet resources, and using self and peer assessments as well engaging in class discussions. Students will have to develop an understanding of the new content and then make their own efforts to apply it.

Assessment and Evaluation Strategies of Student Performance:

Every student attending Christian Virtual School is unique. We believe each student must have the opportunities to achieve success according to their own interests, abilities, and goals. Like the Ministry of Education, we have defined high expectations and standards for graduation, while introducing a range of options that allow students to learn in ways that suit them best and enable them to earn their diplomas. Christian Virtual School’s Assessment, Evaluation, and Reporting Policy is based on seven fundamental principles, as outlined in the Growing Success: Assessment, Evaluation, and Reporting in Ontario Schools document.

When these seven principles are fully understood and observed by all teachers, they guide the collection of meaningful information that helps inform instructional decisions, promote student engagement, and improve student learning. At Christian Virtual School, teachers use practices and procedures that:

1. are fair, transparent, and equitable for all students;
2. support all students, including those with special education needs, those who are learning English, and those who are First Nation, Métis, or Inuit;
3. are carefully planned to relate to the curriculum expectations and learning goals and, as much as possible, to the interests, learning styles and preferences, needs, and experiences of all students;
4. are communicated clearly to students and parents or guardians at the beginning of the school year or course and at other appropriate points throughout the school year or course;
5. are ongoing, varied in nature, and administered over a period of time to provide multiple opportunities for students to demonstrate the full range of their learning;
6. provide ongoing descriptive feedback that is clear, specific, meaningful, and timely to support improved learning and achievement; and
7. develop students’ self-assessment skills to enable them to access their own learning, set specific goals, and plan next steps for their learning.

For more information on Christian Virtual School’s general assessment and evaluation strategies, you can refer to our Assessment, Evaluation, and Reporting Policy.

To ensure that we are meeting the principles of Growing Success, we carefully plan all the assessments within our courses.

First and foremost, they are designed as opportunities for students to improve their learning. Assessment for the purpose of improving student learning is seen as both “assessment for learning (AfL)” and “assessment as learning (AaL)” according to Growing Success. As part of assessment for learning, teachers provide students with descriptive feedback and coaching for improvement. Teachers engage in assessment as learning by helping all students develop their capacity to be independent, autonomous learners who can set individual goals, monitor their own progress, determine next steps, and reflect on their thinking and learning. Examples of these types of assessments in this course include:

Second, we focus on a balance between assessing students’ acquisition of knowledge as well as their skills of thinking, communication, and application of subject-specific material. In this course, you can expect assessment to be divided into the following balance:

Lastly, the assessments are designed so that teachers have an opportunity to gain an understanding of a student’s learning through direct observation of students, one-on-one conversations with students, and evaluating products that students submit. Examples of these methods in this course include:

For more information on our assessment and evaluation strategies, refer to Section 6, Student Achievement, in the Course Calendar.

Program Planning Considerations: