Art Department
From student art exhibits to theater performances to musical concerts, the arts are woven into both daily life and the curriculum at the International School of Boston.
Theater, visual arts, music, and cultural events and activities help ISB students discover and flex their innate abilities to feel, to act, to question, to reflect and to imagine.
Theater
At ISB, we introduce drama in Preschool to enhance personal confidence and oral ability, and to further reinforce French linguistic ability. Students engage in theatrical and role-playing games that allow them to express themselves through their voices and bodies. Theater is part of the curriculum until grade 9 inclusively, and becomes an elective with practice and theory in grades 10-12.
Visual Arts
Art classes are part of the ISB curriculum for students from Preschool through grade 8 and become an elective from grades 9 through 12, when students can choose to study Visual Arts for the International or the French Baccalaureate.
The curriculum provides a balanced course of study that includes art history and art theory, relating both to art made in the classroom or studio. Classes are designed to complement the abilities and interests of each age group, and to build upon techniques and content learned in previous years.
Music
Starting in Preschool, students sing and listen to different styles of music to develop a variety of skills, such as:
- Recognizing rhyming words in songs
- The difference between a quarter note and a half note
- Distinguishing various forms of music
- The direction of melody
- The difference and the role of verse and refrain
Annual performances give students the opportunity to demonstrate their performance behavior and sing in-tune with good pronunciation and diction.
In 2013, ISB received the official designation of École en Poésie by working closely with the French organization Printemps des Poètes to develop a sensitive approach to poetry in our school. It is something only a handful of schools outside of France have achieved, and ISB is one of only two schools in the U.S. with this designation.
