The Mount St Joseph drama curriculum is designed to give all students access to a broad, varied syllabus which will help them to develop a range of creative and transferrable skills needed in the wider world. All of the lessons are built around: using teamwork; developing ideas; building confidence; and being able to express ideas and emotions in many different ways. We also aim to foster and support an interest in the creative and performing arts industries.

Drama and the Performing Arts are designed to support all students in their future learning of other subjects and gives them an opportunity to explore skills that they may not have used before.

Year 7 focuses on trying something new and having fun whilst doing it.

In year 8, we start to develop our drama skills by building on the foundations that we have made in Y7. We continue to use teamwork, improvisation, confidence building and expression of ideas but we now start to add in more serious content. We explore using real life situations to create a piece of drama. We also start to develop our knowledge of dramatic skills and aim to include more in each piece of work as the year goes on.  Script work is further developed this year by using more thought provoking texts and stimuli.  We explore more physical drama by learning basic stage combat skills. Year 8 is about challenging our students to push themselves and develop into mature, levelled performers and artists.

In year 9, we aim to develop students’ dramatic skills even further.  Students study a play from a dramatic perspective; this allows the students to look at how an ensemble is used in a scripted play. Students will also develop their own production based around a core theme, allowing students to experiment with their creativity whilst exploring both the performance and production aspects of a play.

Year 7

Silent film & comedy without words – Exploring the origins of silent comedy, researching famous silent comedy performers, and then performing short silent comedy scenes in groups.

Pantomime – Looking at the origins of the pantomime genre, practicing the key skills needed when performing a pantomime script, and then performing a pantomime script in small groups.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream – Exploring the play and some background knowledge about Shakespeare, understanding and practicing the language, re-writing scenes in our our words to show understanding, and performing them to the class.

Darkwood Manor – Exploring the horror genre and how we can use drama skills to create tension in a haunted house scene.

Improvisation Skills – Exploring different improvisation games, developing and utilizing our improvisation skills, and then performing improvised scenes in groups.

 

Year 8

Urban Legends – Exploring some urban legends, reseraing the origins and differeing versions before acting out our version on the Lizzie Borden story in small groups.

Flint Street Nativity – Explore the idea of the school nativity, look at how younger children behave, perform extracts from the Flint street script and also write and perform our own version of a nativity in groups.

I Don’t Like Mondays – Explore the history of school shootings in America and how the charity Sandy Hook Promise has changed the statstistics by creating and performing PSAs in groups.

Script work and stage combat – Looking at the difference between camera acting and stage acting, exploring the basics of stage combat and then performing scenes from a popular TV show to demonstrate the skills learnt.

Script work and practitioners – Exploring different drama practitionrs and using their techniques within different play scripts including DNA by Dennis Kelly.

 

Year 9

Girls Like That – Explore the play and the social issues within it, perform selected scenes from the play focussing on making the characters realistic, and adapting the script in order for it to be more relevant to today’s teenagers.

The students have to create a performance using the theme of ‘power’ using an imaginary budget and performance space. They will focus on all aspects of the performance including: acting, direction, set design, costume design, lighting design, sound effects, special effects, makeup up and more. 

 

For each half-term there is a Knowledge Expert Sheet which outlines the essential knowledge that all students in Year 7, 8 and 9 need to know.

Students demonstrate their depth of knowledge by completing their Knowledge Expert Books.
 

At Mount St Joseph, our Creative Arts Department aims to ensure that all pupils in Key Stage 4 become confident in taking risks, learning from experience when exploring and experimenting with ideas, and processes, and devising performance and critical performance reviews.

We strive to ensure that all students develop critical understanding through investigating different performing arts elements (both in performance and production/design), stylistic qualities, interpretation, and technical features.

Students will develop skills to be proficient in:

• Investigatigating how professional performance or production work is created 
• Demonstrating understanding of the skills, techniques and approaches used by professionals to create performance/production work.
• Using different rehearsal or production/design processes 
• Applying skills and techniques in performance or realisation 
• Reviewing own development and application of performance or design skills. 

 

Year 10

Component 1: Exploring the Performing Arts

Component 2: Developing Skills and Techniques in the Performing Arts 

Year 11

Component 1: Exploring the Performing Arts

Component 2: Developing Skills and Techniques in the Performing Arts 

Component 3: Responding to a Performing Arts Brief 

 

For each half-term there is a Knowledge Expert Sheet which outlines the essential knowledge that all students in Year 10 and 11 need to know.

Students demonstrate their depth of knowledge by completing their Knowledge Expert Books.