The Arts
The ARTs at Henderson Valley School
‘You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.’ Maya Angelou
Henderson Valley School provides a performing arts programme for all students, consisting of four half day sessions for every class, each term, run by our passionate specialist teacher Mrs Olivia Gibbs. These sessions cover dance, drama and music all of which are disciplines from the Arts in the New Zealand Curriculum.
During these sessions, students are given the opportunity to perform individually, in small groups and as a whole class. Encouraging them to take risks, try something new and build confidence while increasing their understanding of the fundamentals of this curriculum area.
The Performing Arts are regarded as playing an important role in fostering creativity, encouraging self-expression, nurturing talent, building self-esteem, developing self-management skills and encouraging teamwork.
Students learn these skills through a range of varied and fun activities that include singing, dancing, playing and learning about instruments, composing music and creating dramatic performances.
Along with these lessons each term, students also have the opportunity to join our extracurricular groups which are all run by an enthusiastic team of teachers.
Choir led by Ms Susan Wallace:
Our senior school choir meets every week for a 40 minute rehearsal, to get ready for our performance at the final hui of each term and to enjoy the chance to sing together.
Our practises always start off with singing a favourite song to get our voices ready and include warm-up voice exercises. Songs from Disney movies are always popular!
The choir recently sang When I grow up from the musical Matilda at our end of term hui. Students auditioned for solo parts, giving our tamariki opportunities to perform to an audience and show off their talents.
This term we are learning new songs to challenge us to use more harmonies, and exploring different ways of working together as a choir.
Ukulele Group led by Mrs Lis Keal
The ukulele group meets every Wednesday at morning tea playtime. We are a dedicated group who enjoy playing the ukulele while singing the songs we know, as well as learning new ones.
We are very lucky to be supported by the NZ Ukulele Trust which provides us with online resources. We have videos of songs that have been specially arranged to make it easy to learn to play them.
We are working towards combining with a few local schools in October for a Ukulele Jam led by Suzy Cato!
The ukulele is easy to learn, easy to carry, and we get a lot of enjoyment playing and singing together.