The Nootka Fine Arts Program

The Nootka Fine Arts Program offers children a minimum of 30-per-cent of their weekly instruction in the four fine arts: dance, drama, music and art. Every Nootka Fine Arts classroom teacher is a specialist in at least one of the four, fine arts disciplines.

In Kindergarten, the children receive all of their fine arts instruction from their classroom teacher.

In Grades 1-4, the students receive their fine arts instruction from the teacher-specialists in the school’s art, drama or music room or dance studio. Sometimes, students from different grades join together to study one of the arts; for example, there is a Kindergarten to Grade 4 fine arts choir.

Every fine arts classroom teacher is also an arts-specialist so they use their specialty in academic classroom instruction. For example, students in a language arts class recently read a book and then made puppets of some of the characters from the story and used the puppets to act out scenes from the book.

Research has verified that arts-based instruction is very effective, especially for teaching in mathematics and reading.