Our school is special because:

"You can do stuff like music,
sport and Japanese"

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Specialist Programs

At St Kilda Primary all students from Prep to Year 6 participate in our specialist programs. We have specialist teachers for Visual Arts, Performing Arts, Physical Education and Japanese classes.

Three of our four specialist programs are based in King’s Hall in our Arts Building. By physically placing three of our four specialist teachers in the same building we endeavour to support strong connections between Visual Art, Performing Art and Physical Education.

Visual Art

The children have a weekly session with our art teacher who focuses on developing the children’s skills in drawing, painting, sculpting and many other forms of art. These sessions encourage all our children to express themselves creatively and enjoy the experience of designing and producing a piece of work that will stay in their family for a long time. The work that is produced is often displayed around the school or taken home for the children to share with their families.

Performing Arts

Drama, dancing and music form the core areas of this subject. There are many opportunities for the children to perform in front of their peers, other classes and at assembly. One of the major performance opportunities for our students is our whole school production which takes place every alternate year. This is a wonderful event where the whole school community gets involved to perform a musical production in a theatre venue. It is certainly a night to remember for everyone, young and old!
The senior children also take part in Theatre Sports which culminates in a hotly contested competition in front of a panel of judges (teachers) for a plaque recording their success.
Through both our arts programs the children have many chances to explore and express their creative sides and are positively encouraged to step ‘outside the box’.

Physical Education

Having a healthy approach to life is the key value of our Physical Education program. As well as the core program that focuses on building key skills and attitudes to sport, our program incorporates coaching clinics in sports such as football, basketball, hockey and netball. Throughout the year a number of professional bodies come in to work with different year levels. These include golf, lacrosse, basketball and football. Children from Year 3 to Year 6 are involved in Gala Days throughout the year where they can play in a competition setting. Our PE teacher ensures that they have practised the skills involved and feel confident when taking part in these events. Each year the children take part in a two week swimming program where they are taught at a level that matches their ability.
We are keen to develop and enrich community relationships and hold a number of events across the year to address this. These events include: our Family Sports Night, House Sports Day, the Kelly-Woodford Cup (which is run by parents and is a football match where the parents and staff verse the children, the children usually win!) and the Tommy Lahiff Cup (football community event across neighbouring primary schools) of which we were the proud winners in 2009.

Japanese

St Kilda has a highly engaging Japanese language program for students from Prep to Year 6.

Students practise their Japanese skills both orally via video, Skype (communicating directly with our sister city school, Ishigase Elementary, in Japan) and in written forms. Throughout their seven years at St Kilda, children build their knowledge of Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji scripts. They study Japanese vocabulary and grammatical structures that are meaningful and related to real life experiences and significant Japanese cultural events.

As part of our program our school holds a whole school annual event called ‘Matsuri Day’. It is usually celebrated in Japan from 13-15 August to honour the spirits of the ancestors who are thought to return to their family homes around this time each year. Matsuri has been celebrated in Japan since the 7th century, 1300 years!  Our special Matsuri day allows all students to dress in Japanese costumes and participate in many traditional cultural activities such a Tea Ceremony, calligraphy, lantern making, dancing, martial arts demonstrations and origami making.

The Japanese program also reflects the schools commitment to incorporating various forms of Information Communication Technology (ICT) into all areas of study.   The Japanese language program also includes using video, animation, software (Kahootz) and internet communication tools such as Skype and Communicator.

St Kilda Primary has been privileged to have a very exciting sister city relationship with Ishigase Elementary school from a district in Obu city Japan. We have also played an important part in the sister city relationship the city of Port Phillip has with Obu City. In recent years we have had the honour of hosting Japanese students from Ishigase Elementary as well as visit their fantastic school with some very excited St Kilda Year 6 students and teachers.  Our now well established home-stay tour program is a source of great pride to our school and our community. The direct student to student connections created through this experience personalises the relevance of Japanese language and powerfully contributes to the emergence of the new generation of global citizens.