The Arts

In the arts, students are enabled by relevant skills and understandings to create and respond to imaginative and explorative works.

Students learn the arts best by having the opportunities to explore and create, being exposed to a variety of stimuli, and having opportunities to respond to the works of others.

At CPS, emphasised approaches to teaching the arts are creativity, active participation, and knowledge and skills.

"The arts are powerful forms of expression that recognise, value, and contribute to the unique bicultural and multicultural character of Aotearoa New Zealand, enriching the lives of all New Zealanders. The arts have their own distinct languages that use both verbal and non-verbal conventions, mediated by selected processes and technologies. Through movement, sound, and image, the arts transform people's creative ideas into expressive works that communicate layered meanings.

Learning in, through, and about the arts stimulates creative action and response by engaging and connecting thinking, imagination, senses, and feelings. By participating in the arts, students' personal well-being is enhanced. As students express and interpret ideas within creative, aesthetic, and technological frameworks, their confidence to take risks is increased.

In the arts, students learn to work both independently and collaboratively to construct meanings, produce works, and respond to and value others' contributions. They learn to use imagination to engage with unexpected outcomes and to explore multiple solutions.

Arts education values young children's experiences and builds on these with increasing sophistication and complexity as their knowledge and skills develop. Through the use of creative and intuitive thought and action, learners in the arts are able to view their world from new perspectives. Through the development of arts literacies, students, as creators, presenters, viewers, and listeners, are able to participate in, interpret, value, and enjoy the arts throughout their lives."