Art, Drama, and Music: Life Beyond Academics at Casagrand International School Kelambakkam

Ask a parent what actually made their child excited to go to school, and it's rarely the maths worksheet. It's usually the play they got a part in, the painting that made it onto the wall, or the instrument they finally learned to play properly. At Casagrand International School Kelambakkam, that side of school life isn't an afterthought squeezed into a Friday afternoon — it's built into every stage of a student's years there, from Preschool right through to Grade 12.

Visual Arts That Grow With the Child

In the Primary years at Casagrand International School Kelambakkam, art starts with exposure — art history, the styles of different artists, famous paintings, and hands-on projects tied directly to what's being studied in the regular classroom. Students get to critique and appreciate each other's work on display, and the standout achievement for a younger student is being selected for the school-wide Artscape show each spring — a genuinely proud moment for a seven or eight-year-old.

By Middle School, the work gets more serious: year-long courses covering drawing, painting, collage, sculpture with plaster and clay, photography, and even architecture. Field trips to art museums and artists' studios round out the classroom side of it, giving students a sense that art is something that exists in the world, not just something confined to a workbook.

By Upper School, it's a genuine studio experience — 3D design, painting, drawing, photography — supported by artist talks and museum visits, with an explicit emphasis on students learning to take creative risks and get past the fear of making mistakes. That's a meaningful thing to build into a curriculum on purpose, since fear of "getting it wrong" is exactly what stops a lot of teenagers from trying anything creative at all.

Drama: From a Preschool Stage to a Real Production

Drama at Casagrand International School Kelambakkam starts almost as early as school itself, with grade-level productions in Preschool and Lower School designed specifically to build confidence and communication skills — not polish, just the experience of standing in front of people and being heard. Middle School students take drama classes several times a week, focused on presentation skills, teamwork, problem-solving, and creative expression, and by Grade 7 and 8, students can choose to be part of the annual Middle School play — a real production, not a classroom exercise.

Music Across Every Division

Music runs through the entire school at Casagrand International School Kelambakkam, not just as an elective for the musically inclined. Preschool and Primary students attend general music classes twice a week — singing, playing simple rhythm instruments, movement, basic composition — building toward an understanding of beat, pitch, and rhythm. Senior students go further, choosing an instrument and studying it properly twice a week, alongside singing, movement, composition, and music history. All of it eventually leads somewhere real: performances at Grandparents/Special Friends Day and Festival Day, plus grade-level music productions, give students an actual audience for the work they've been doing all year.

Why This Actually Matters, Not Just as a Nice-to-Have

It's easy to treat arts, drama, and music as the soft, optional part of a school's offering — pleasant, but not essential. That framing misses something. A student who's had to stand on a stage in Grade 2 and again in Grade 8 has practiced a specific kind of confidence that a purely academic timetable never builds. A student who's spent years in a school production or an art studio has learned to handle creative risk and public feedback in a way that quietly supports everything else they do, including the subjects that actually get graded.

Is This the Right Fit for Your Child?

If you're looking at Casagrand International School Kelambakkam and want to know whether "holistic development" is a real commitment or just a phrase on the website, this is a fairly good place to check. Ask specifically how often a Grade 3 student gets to perform, or how the Artscape selection process actually works — questions with concrete answers are a much better test than any general claim about "well-rounded education." If academics and arts both matter to you in choosing a school, it's worth pairing what you learn here with a visit to see the studios, stage, and music rooms in person before deciding.