Arts at the Forefront

Alfreton Grange Arts College, which was granted specialist status in visual and performing arts in September 2008, puts creative thinking right at the heart of the
new National Curriculum.

For this school year, as we did last year, the College welcomes its new Year 7  students by putting Personal, Learning and Thinking Skills (PLTS) at the forefront of the learning experience for the first term by devising a cross-curricular creative project for which the focus is the six ‘thinking skills’.
 
Director of Arts Russ Singleton said; "The six week project enables students across all subjects, to develop their thinking skills through a creative project entitled 'Through the Door', culminating in a showcase afternoon for parents and carers.

"Our aim is to develop an understanding of the importance of developing thinking
skills and we were also keen to encourage parents to start to use the associated language of PLTS with their children".
 
Last year, the college engaged a professional storyteller for the six week project to
work alongside teachers and students where appropriate, providing a valuable stimulus for some of the work. The students were also given a 'skills passport' so 
that they could keep record of their own skills development.
 
The well attended showcase included display work, descriptions of the lessons and erformance-based work including the English Department’s African performance poetry with Djembe drums, PE's 'creative ladder', Maths demonstrated the Fibonacci sequence in nature whilst Science’s 'Journey of a Cheese Sandwich through Enzyme City' showed just what creative thinking can do to aid learning.
 
This Year our Year 8 Students will be following up their Y7 project with a further similar project.

The College also arranged a great model for life in general using song writing as the foundation.

Many work based situations involve people having to work outside their comfort zone in teams that may include people they don’t know well and then produce quality outputs ithin very tight deadlines. That’s exactly what 18 GCSE and BTEC music students were asked to do when they were given two days to write, record and perform a brand new song.

The workshop was led by professional singers Chrissy Mostyn and Richard Pilkington
of the duo Blackheart, who’ve recently toured the UK with Jared Osmond from the amous American entertainment family.

The students were teamed up and between them wrote eight songs from titles given to them on the first morning by Richard & Chrissy.

They then had to write lyrics and music on day one, whilst day two saw them perfect the songs and record them. The finale saw the students, in the Alfreton Grange Theatre, performing their creations to an audience of friends and family who were also treated to a terrific set from Blackheart.

One proud parent, Chris Bexton, wrote to the college showing his appreciation; “I've een students get excited about new courses before, but once the cold light of day illuminates the fact that they require an amount of work to complete them some, unfortunately, fall by the wayside.

“I've never seen such devotion to a short course as I saw in the students that took part in Richard and Chrissy's classes. The pure enjoyment, enthusiasm and desire to fulfil it showed in the top notch performances all the students put in at the concert.”