Specialist Subjects
We are a learner-centred institution providing equal emphasis on academic progress, as well as the growth and development of the whole child in the areas of music, the Arts, sports and the environment. We aim to provide the skills, knowledge and understanding necessary for our students to become successful lifelong learners.
Specialist Subjects at HAIS
Art and Design gives learners a platform to express themselves, sparking imagination, creativity and developing transferable skills. Students explore and push boundaries to become reflective, critical and decisive thinkers. They learn how to articulate personal responses to their experiences.
What will students learn?
Learn to see themselves as artists and become increasingly reflective and independent.
Develop the skills needed to express ideas creatively and to communicate visually.
Understand their place and the place of others in a creative, innovative and interconnected world.
Physical Education is a vital part of a balanced school curriculum. Regular exercise improves physical and mental health and there is growing evidence that it improves academic performance across the curriculum. Establishing good patterns of exercise in lower secondary school provides learners with the foundation of an active and healthy lifestyle.
What will students learn?
This subject is about learning to move and moving to learn. Learners develop skills through a wide variety of age-appropriate physical activities, including games, team sports, gymnastics and dance.
Increase confidence, move with increasing control, fluency and variety.
Improve their understanding of concepts, rules, tactics, strategies and compositional ideas.
Participate in respectful and responsible ways, engaging appropriately and safely.
Improve knowledge and understanding of how physical education can contribute to a healthy and active lifestyle.
Develop transferable skills promoting physical, cognitive and social development, and become independent, critical and reflective movers and thinkers.
The drama programme at HAIS gives students the opportunity to enact and understand drama, recognising it as a practical art form in which ideas and meaning are communicated to an audience through choices of form, style and convention.
What will students learn?
- Apply knowledge and understanding when making, performing and responding to drama.
- Explore performance texts, understanding their social, cultural and historical contexts including the theatrical conventions of the period in which they were created.
- Develop a range of theatrical skills and apply them to create performances.
- Work collaboratively to generate, develop and communicate ideas.
- Develop as creative, effective, independent and reflective students able to make informed choices in process and performance.
- Contribute as an individual to a theatrical performance.
- Reflect on and evaluate their own work and that of others.
- Develop an awareness and understanding of the roles and processes undertaken in contemporary professional theatre practice.
- Adopt safe working practices.
Music fosters creativity and builds confidence. It helps learners to express themselves and shows them the importance of communication as they learn to connect with other musicians and with audiences.
What will students learn?
Learners explore music as performers, composers and informed listeners. They make, understand and appreciate music from different cultures, times and places, helping them to develop leadership and collaboration skills as well as self-confidence.
- Cultivate a joy of music through participating in meaningful and enjoyable experiences.
- Develop the knowledge, skills and attitudes necessary to contribute as musicians.
- Collaborate with others in purposeful and expressive ways through singing and playing instruments.
- Nurture their individual and collective creativity.
- Use their growing knowledge to explore and generate music that is unique, relevant and valuable.
Students develop creative skills that will help with many aspects of their future learning.
Languages are part of the cultural richness of our society and the world in which we live and work. Learning languages contributes to mutual understanding, a sense of global citizenship and personal fulfilment. Our additional language teachers enable pupils to express their ideas and thoughts in another language and to understand and respond to its speakers, both in speech and in writing.
Which additional languages do we offer?
What will students learn?
- Understand and respond to spoken and written language from a variety of authentic sources.
- Speak with increasing confidence, fluency and spontaneity, finding ways of communicating what they want to say, including through discussion and asking questions, and continually improving the accuracy of their pronunciation and intonation.
- Can write at varying lengths, for different purposes and audiences, using a variety of grammatical structures that they have learnt.
- Discover and develop an appreciation of a range of writing in the language studied.
