Overview

  • Visual Arts
    The Clayton Fine Arts Department believes that Visual Arts is an essential aspect of every child's education. Visual Arts at every grade level instructs students to think creatively and critically and exposes them to diverse cultures through all periods of history.  It accomplishes this in part by allowing students to have "hands-on" experiences in the creation of many forms of Visual Art. It is our goal to help students understand that art and design have a vital role in society and to develop an individual sense of aesthetics. Beginning in kindergarten and continuing through high school, students have the opportunity to experience all forms and genres of Visual Art.

    Music
    The Clayton Fine Arts Department believes that music is an essential aspect of every child's education. Music is a uniquely human quality, inherent to all individuals regardless of society, culture, or generation. Students must have opportunities to study music in the way that serves them best. Experiencing a variety of vocal and instrumental music propels lifelong learning, develops character, engages human emotion, and promotes critical and creative thinking within the individual, the community, and the world.  Beginning in Kindergarten and continuing through high school, students have the opportunity to experience music through voice, band and/or orchestra.

    Theatre
    The Clayton Fine Arts Department believes that Theatre is an essential aspect of every child's education. Theatre is an art of synthesis.  It gives students, both individually and collaboratively, the opportunity to develop empathy and to explore varied cultural experiences and universal themes of humankind.  Using the dramatic process (creating, performing and analyzing), students learn to see the created world of theatre through the eyes of the actor, playwright, designer, and director. They develop skills to understand dramatic structure, which is fundamental to the literacy of all great world literature. Theatre provides for a student’s self-discovery, self-definition, and self-esteem. (Text is based on the Arizona Theatre Standards and Practices.)
    Listed below are the Enduring Understandings of the Fine Arts curriculum.  These are statements that summarize important ideas and core processes that are central to a discipline and have lasting value beyond the classroom.
     

    Enduring Understandings

    (Based on www.cpalms.org)

     

    Creativity

    Creating, interpreting, and responding in the arts stimulate the imagination and encourage innovation and creative risk-taking. The structural rules and conventions of an art form serve as both a foundation and departure point for creativity. The arts are inherently experiential and actively engage learners in the processes of creating, interpreting, and responding to art.

     

    Critical Thinking and Reflection

    Cognition and reflection are required to appreciate, interpret, and create with artistic intent. Assessing our own and others’ artistic work, through critical thinking, problem solving, and decision-making, is central to artistic growth. People gain insights into meanings of artworks by engaging in the process of art criticism (National Visual Arts Core Standards). The process of critiquing the arts leads to development of critical-thinking skills transferable to other contexts.

     

    The Arts and Culture

    The arts give us the means to understand the complex cultural relationships between all peoples. The arts reflect and document cultural trends and historical events, and help explain how new directions in the arts have emerged. Connections among the arts and other disciplines strengthen learning and the ability to transfer knowledge and skills to and from other fields. Every art form uses its own unique language, verbal and non-verbal, to document and communicate with the world.

     

    Essential Skills, Techniques and Processes

    Development of skills, techniques, and processes in the arts strengthens our ability to remember, focus on, process, and sequence information. Through purposeful practice, artists learn to manage, master, and refine simple, then complex, skills and techniques. These skills often culminate in performances and/or exhibition of work.