Inspired by Animals? Of Course!

Animals have inspired many composers and choreographers.  By exploring animals through creative dance concepts, students improvised dances.

Concepts we explored were:
ENERGY
FORCE:  powerful or delicate
TIME/ TEMPO:  unhurried (adagio)  or quick (allegro)
FLOW:  staccato/ detached  or legato/smooth/ flowing

SPACE
LEVELS: low, middle, high
PATHWAYS: straight, curved, zigzag

Students danced to "Olympic Fanfare" using unhurried and quick movements.  They became giants and fairies in "Cross Dance."

Students explored the various movements of mini-beasts.  They analyzed the movements of six different mini-beasts, and organized them to give variety to their dance piece.

Photos and videos will follow.

Students have been listening to pieces from Camille Saint-Saens "Carnival of the Animals." Saint-Saens wrote humorous compositions about various animals. Your daughter can listen to the entire piece here.

 Using the dance language above, they were able to describe how they could move to each of the varied movements.

Visiting Nakamachi Day Home for St. Raphaela Day

Today, Friday 19th May we celebrated St. Raphaela's Day, the founder of the Handmaids of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and patron saint of our Seisen Sisters, with a day of service. 

As part of this service the grade 1 students visited the Nakamachi Day Home in Yōga and sang, danced and performed songs to entertain the senior citizens that visit the home.  May and Mio are to be commended on being such brave risk takers, performing solos on the piano and violin.  They both gave amazing performances and blew the teachers away with their skill level. After the fantastic performances the girls then chatted and made origami with the senior citizens.  The girls are to be congratulated on how polite and friendly they were with the elderly at the Nakamachi Day Home.  I am sure they brightened the days of many of the visitors to the centre.  

Amazing, Extraordinary Homemade Instruments

Lots of things have been happening in our Grade One music classes.  We just realized that you haven't had a chance to look at these beautiful instruments made by Grade One in their last unit of inquiry.

If you looked around the Grade One classrooms, you could find many examples of amazing, extraordinary homemade instruments!

The most popular instrument groups were shakers and strings.  A few students, however, made drums, scrapers, metals, wind instruments and barred instruments.  They had a chance to talk about how they made their instruments and created a short "sound carpet" to tell a story about the cherry blossoms.

Here are just examples of the students sharing their stories. I'm sure that they'll have fun creating more instruments throughout their summer holidays.

Sports Day and First Grade leading Mass

Dear Parents,

We had a busy week in grade 1.

On Tuesday, we had our elementary sports day. You can see what kind of a day we had by going to:

http://www.seisen.com/student-life

There are many outstanding photos from this day and should be able to find your daughter by logging into the secure portal on the Seisen website under the "Galleries" page. Go to ES Sports Day Photo Gallery. The link to get there is: http://www.seisen.com/student-portal/photo-galleries. If you do not know how to login to the parent portal, there are instructions at the bottom of this email.

On Thursday, the students led their first mass of the year. You can see some wonderful photos here: https://goo.gl/photos/MeGoQkPdbRvBtyCz5

Coming up next Friday is St. Raphaela Day. Here is a quick video of what the day is about. 

https://youtu.be/Mxq6Gy27NGg

Many thanks to Mr Brittain for the photos and videos from this week. They will leave you with wonderful memories!

Instructions for Parent to Log in to the Secure Portal

All Seisen parents can access both the "Parents" and "Students" portal of the Seisen website using the e-mail address registered with the school.

If you are logging in for the first time this year:

1. Go to www.seisen.com
2. Click on the "Parents" button at the top of the page
3. Click on the "Forgot Username or Password" at the bottom
4. Enter the email address you have registered with the Records Office
5. Open the email notification sent to you
6. Enter a new password that will be easy for you to remember
7. Allow your browser to remember your password
8. http://www.seisen.com/student-portal/photo-galleries
9. Email the Records office with any problems skim@seisen.com

If you have already set up your password on the new website since February and your browser has your password saved, you should be able to enter directly using the link to the photo galleries. http://www.seisen.com/student-portal/photo-galleries