France Seconde Optional subjects (2de)
Chapters: 2
1. General options
Third modern language · Latin and Greek · Arts options · Extra PE
- Arts Education: Art Forms, Creating and Running an Art Project – Arts education at school covers several domains: visual arts, music, dance, theatre, cinema and audiovisual art, circus arts and art history. In each one you do three things: practise and create (making), meet and look at art by professionals (receiving), and think and talk about it (reflecting). An art project follows a cycle: an idea or brief, research, experiments, choosing and making, sharing with an audience, and reflecting, with notes or a portfolio kept all the way. Art forms often mix: music with dance, film with theatre. Visiting a museum, concert or theatre and talking with artists builds your own taste and understanding.
- Physical Fitness – Physical fitness is the body's ability to do daily work, play and sport with energy to spare. It has five health-related components (heart-lung endurance, muscular strength, muscular endurance, flexibility, body composition) and six skill-related ones (speed, agility, power, balance, coordination, reaction time). We improve it with a planned programme using FITT (frequency, intensity, time, type) and training principles like overload, progression, specificity, rest and reversibility.
2. Technological options
Management · Health and social care · Biotechnology · Lab science · Engineering science · Technological creation and innovation · Design culture and creation · Dance, music or theatre practice
- Nature and Significance of Management – Management means getting work done with and through people so that goals are reached on time (effectiveness) and at low cost (efficiency). It has organisational, social and personal objectives. It is partly a science, fully an art and not yet a full profession. It works at three levels (top, middle, lower) through five functions (planning, organising, staffing, directing, controlling), and coordination joins them all.
- Health Care System: Where to Go, Your Rights and Who Pays – A health care system is the set of people, places and money that keep a population healthy. Care comes in levels: self-care and the pharmacy for small problems, primary care (family doctor) as the first door, specialists and tests by referral, hospitals for serious illness, and the emergency department reached through 112 when life is in danger. Patients have rights: information, consent, privacy, dignity and complaint. E-health (online records, e-prescriptions, telemedicine) makes access easier. Money comes from taxes, insurance contributions and out-of-pocket payments, pooled to pay for services.
- Lab Skills: How to Do a Good Experiment – A good experiment starts with a clear question that can be tested. You plan a fair test: change one thing (the independent variable), measure one thing (the dependent variable) and keep all the others the same (controlled variables). You measure with the right instrument, repeat the measurement, and take the mean. The spread of the readings, half the range, tells you the uncertainty. You write everything in a lab notebook (date, aim, method, table, observations) and then in a report (aim, method, results, graph, conclusion, evaluation). The same skills help in lab projects and in everyday science, like testing which detergent works best.
- Systems Engineering – Systems engineering designs a product as a whole system. It starts from the user's need, turns it into measurable requirements, follows the flows of matter, energy and information through the parts, and checks the result on the way back up the V-cycle: verify (built right?) and validate (right thing?).
- The Design Process: From Problem to Product – The design process is a loop of steps designers use to solve a real problem for real people: investigate the need, define it in a brief and a measurable specification, generate many ideas, build a prototype, then test and evaluate it against the specification. Whatever fails sends you back round the loop. This repeating is called iteration, and it is how almost every product, app, building and artwork is improved.
- Performing Arts: Music, Dance and Theatre, Live – The performing arts are arts that happen live, in time, through the performer's body and voice: music, dance and theatre (and mixes like opera, musicals and street plays). Every performance needs a performer, an audience and a space. A show grows from an idea through rehearsal to performance and reflection.