Late last year we ran a competition offering one of five VISA pre-paid gift cards to ARTS:LIVE users who took out a Full Access subscription between October 22nd and December 31st 2017.

We’re pleased to announce that the winners are:

A. Farrugia, NSW
C. Larsen, VIC
G. Bell, QLD
J. Freeman, VIC
M. Hancock, NSW

Congratulations! Winners are currently being notified.

Did you know that ARTS:LIVE is brought to you by non-profit organisation, The Song Room? This means that your ARTS:LIVE Full Access subscription fees go directly towards supporting disadvantaged Australian children so that they can participate in music and arts programs that are proven to enhance their education, personal development and community involvement.

Register today! 

As the holidays are starting this week, we thought we’d share one of our new ‘at home’ activities with you. What better way to spend a crafternoon than by creating your own sock puppet?

Puppetry is a great way to be creative and experiment with role play, so let your imagination run wild by making a sock puppet using all kinds of found objects and craft supplies.

Check it out here!

ARTS:LIVE is now available for everyone to register. Children of all ages, educators and parents alike can explore, learn and develop their creative skills.

We’ve added a new range of fun ‘at home’ activities, too. There are craft, art, media and music projects for children and adults to do together or individually. There are activities suitable for 1 year olds all the way through to teenagers to enjoy. Whatever you’re looking for, we’re sure you’ll find something fun to do after school, on the weekends or during the school holidays.

If you want to explore other at home activities on the site, simply register above, log in and search for ‘at home’ in the search bar.

Creative kids are brighter kids – they do better at school and enjoy school life more. Being creative gives children opportunities to be imaginative, work together, and learn. ARTS:LIVE provides all the resources children need to get them going on this journey!

By Elisa Williams, Regional Program Manager, The Song Room

Hi drama teachers, I am really excited to share with you a new devised theatre resource I have created to help guide you through the sometimes daunting process of devising an original show with your students.  I’m not sure about you, but I love it when I get an insight into how other drama teachers work, I love learning new techniques and processes that I can try out with my students, it keeps my work alive. So I have put together a comprehensive guide of all of the strategies I have developed over the years to use when teaching play making.

It’s been a really fun journey putting this together and it started when I was invited to represent The Song Room to deliver a devised theatre workshop at the Singapore Drama Educators Association Conference in July 2017.

 

 

Of course I leapt at this opportunity. As well as my work at the Song Room and lecturing in drama at uni, I am also completing my PhD in drama education and I felt this would give me an opportunity to share some of my devised theatre techniques with an international audience. We decided to film at the conference and to create a devised theatre resource for secondary drama teachers while I was there.

I had the pleasure of working with an amazing bunch of conference delegates, including drama practitioners from Singapore, India, Vietnam and even Brunei. You will see from the videos on the course how creative they were. I took them through the first few steps I take when devising theatre with my students, exploring techniques that I refer to a lot in the resource.

Stories from Home is a devised theatre project. Check it out on ARTS:LIVE here. It is a complete toolkit that will guide you through a whole term of workshops to create an original show with your Year 9 or 10 drama class. It contains five videos, ten lesson plans, assessment tasks, rubrics, teacher notes and handouts. I chose to focus on devised theatre because, not only is it my specialty, but it is essential that students get as much practise as they can in creating original work to prepare them for Year 12 and the original solo performance that is their major assessment point.

 

 

The resource is based on the stories of six teenage asylum seekers. Whilst I wrote these stories myself, they are based on very similar stories I have heard over the years as a drama teacher working with new arrival students. The resource shows you how to take a small passage of text and use it as the basis for improvisation; how you can unlock layers of meaning in a text and portray it physically and vocally. The students are asked to reflect on the refugee’s stories, to ask themselves what it would be like to be displaced and in doing this to consider what ‘home’ means to them? Does ‘home’ mean the same for everyone? How can they bring their own memories, their own stories, their own sounds of home into their work and what happens when they contrast these with the stories of their refugee characters?

The lesson plans and videos will take you through all of this in a step by step, scaffolded and sequenced approach – with lots of fun warm ups and reflections thrown in as well.

The resource contains two assessment tasks, a marking rubric and many handouts that will help you to teach your students how to develop a narrative, how to explore tension, as well as very structured ideas for you to use when staging the performance. It is aligned to the Australian Curriculum for Years 9 and 10 and you will see that each lesson heavily features one of the drama elements. This is because I want students to get familiar with using those elements as tools, by focussing on each element they will make their work deeper and richer.

Of course you can take this resource and use it in any way you like, change it up, add your own ideas, bring it to life in any way you choose. I hope that it is a help to you, as drama teachers we rely on each other for inspiration, to remind us of other ways of seeing things. I hope that this brings you new insight, it is an honour for me to share my techniques with you – enjoy the creative process!

Check out Stories from Home on ARTS:LIVE here.

If you haven’t registered for ARTS:LIVE yet, you can do so here.

Elisa Williams is the Regional Program Manager for the Song Room and is also a lecturer in Drama Education at Edith Cowan University Perth. Elisa began her career as a drama practitioner in 1993 when she was one of the pioneers of the Act 3 International Drama Academy in Singapore. Since then she has trained in Acting at the Victorian College of the Arts and worked as an actor and theatre maker in Melbourne, London, Germany and Perth. She is currently completing her PhD in Drama Education at Edith Cowan University.

 

 

The 2017 Adobe Certified Associate (ACA) World Championship is now open for students between ages 13-22 to enter.

For this design challenge, students are given a real-world brief for which you will create material using Adobe Photoshop, InDesign, and/or Illustrator. The Song Room is proud to be the 2017 charity partner for this amazing competition.

All you have to do is design a poster for ARTS:LIVE – the best entry scores a trip to Disneyland to represent Australia at the world championships!

For further information and full terms and conditions, please visit adobechampionship.com.au


The Song Room is extremely proud to announce a new partnership with The a2 Milk Company™!

The partnership will see The a2 Milk Company™ and The Song Room develop a range of digital arts education resources for The Song Room’s new-look ARTS:LIVE digital education hub.

These fun and engaging resources will cover a range of art forms and year levels, and are designed to encourage children to make positive choices in their lives.

“I have seen first-hand the benefits of music in a child’s life. The a2 Milk Company™ is proud to be supporting The Song Room to provide a more creative learning environment in Australian schools” said The a2 Milk Company’s CEO (ANZ), Peter Nathan.

The official launch of the partnership took place recently at Kingsbury Primary School in Melbourne’s North, where The Song Room CEO Caroline Aebersold and The a2 Milk Company™ CEO (ANZ) Peter Nathan got to participate in a workshop program run by Song Room Teaching Artist Katie Hull-Brown.

Stay tuned for more information about these exciting resources, available soon at www.artslive.com.au.

A special thank you to the students, teachers and Principal at Kingsbury Primary School.

 

The Song Room is building on its reputation as Australia’s leading arts education provider by launching the new-look ARTS:LIVE digital music and arts education hub.

Originally launched in 2013, ARTS:LIVE has grown to become Australia’s gold standard for online arts education resources, being used by over 1 million students in more than 70% of Australian schools.

Presently, fewer than 25% of Australian school children currently enjoy the benefits of specialised music teachers. ARTS:LIVE bridges that equity gap by offering unprecedented access to in-depth, curriculum-aligned, classroom-ready interactive learning from anywhere in Australia, regardless of their existing skills and knowledge.

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The new Music Industry Insight activities feature the work of some of Australia’s finest musicians and industry experts, including Gotye, Gossling, Clare Bowditch, Henry Wagons and Bluejuice. These activities provide a ‘behind the scenes’ look at the music industry. You can use them to help students find their musical niche and share it with the world. While these resources are secondary-focussed,  primary school teachers can adapt them by using the videos as a stimulus in music lessons. Combined with the Getting Started with Music resources in the Teacher Toolkit, ARTS:LIVE has plenty of tips and tricks to help teachers stimulate their own and their students’ creativity.

The Song Room had the pleasure of working in collaboration with APRA/AMCOS to create these resources.

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Australian Theatre for Young People (ATYP) and The Song Room have partnered to create an ARTS:LIVE resource focusing on site-specific theatre. Our new Plan a Performance course features the Site-Specific Work activity, rich in contemporary contexts but inspiring students to delve deep into history. Members of ATYP took to Sydney’s docks to demonstrate what makes a site interesting and show you how to turn a place into a performance space.

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