Art
Art and Design
Intent
At St Joseph’s, we strive to help children grow as artists, and we provide pupils with the knowledge and skills to experiment, invent and create their own works of art.
We want our pupils to:
- Produce creative work, exploring their ideas and recording their experiences.
- Understand the ways art connects us with our past, helps us embrace the present, and empowers us to shape our future.
- Become proficient in drawing, painting, collage, sculpture and other art, craft and design techniques.
- Evaluate and analyse creative works using the language of art, craft and design.
- Know about great artists, craft makers and designers, and understand the historical and cultural development of their art forms.
Implementation
Our Art curriculum is designed around the idea that art is far more than a series of technical skills. Our holistic curriculum nurtures creativity and helps ensure pupils learn through art, as well as about art.
We use Access Art to support our staff’s subject knowledge in delivering high quality teaching. Learning is carefully sequenced to deepen understanding of key concepts and allows all pupils to grow and achieve their full potential. This also ensures that the children learn about a variety of artists, linked to a variety of media.
Our children will learn a wide range of skills, developing understanding and showing clear progression. But crucially, the knowledge and understanding pupils will build will go far beyond just technical and factual knowledge. Our curriculum balances declarative knowledge with experiential knowledge, building self-knowledge and nurturing traits in learners which will hold them in good stead whichever direction their learning takes them. This is evident in the ownership and creative licence the children are given over their sketchbooks.
Art is taught in half termly blocks, opposite a Design and Technology unit. Each half term our pupils will focus on a different skill and artist. Over the course of each key stage (KS1 and both lower and upper KS2) all art skills will be taught. We study artists, designers and craftspeople not so we can make copies or pastiches of their style, but so we can learn from the way they see the world.
At the beginning of each unit the pupils will study explore at least one artist’s work using their sketchbooks. This includes detailed annotations, which become progressively more critical throughout KS2. Children will explore the use of history, culture, line, pattern, colour, texture and tone. This helps the children to explore their artist and become familiar with their work before the unit begins.
The unit will then progress to developing the chosen skill in their sketch books where the children are able to try out ideas, experiment, practice formal methods and apply their knowledge.
A final piece of artwork will then be produced and displayed in classrooms. These will be updated each time a unit has been completed.
Our Early years promotes the learning of Art through a wide and varied curriculum linked to ‘Expressive arts and design’ as the development of pupils’ artistic and cultural awareness supports their imagination and creativity. It is important that children have regular opportunities to engage with the arts, enabling them to explore and play with a wide range of media and materials.
Assessment
There are no national standards in Primary Art and Design. However, we advocate ongoing assessment based upon lots of conversation and questioning to discover intention and understanding, as well as looking at outcomes of the journey and the end result. The annotations that the children make during their explorations will be key to assessing children’s deeper understanding of their unit.
Impact
The St Joseph’s Art Curriculum is about exploring what art is; giving pupils lots of different kinds of opportunities and experiences (media, techniques, approaches, artists), all underpinned by creative use of drawing and sketchbooks. We know our children are learning and making progress in Art when they:
- Developed resilience, competence and confidence in their own ability in a range of Art skills.
- Feel inspired by the work of others and are excited to develop a life-long learning for the subject.
- Develop their capacity for imaginative and original thought through experimentation.
- Develop their abilities to articulate and communicate ideas, options and feelings about their own work and that of others.
- Experience an abundance of opportunities to explore and experiment with different skills and techniques.
- Learn about artists, designers and architects and understand the historical and cultural development of their art forms.
- Achieve well in Art which is reflected through a consistent learning journey and clear progress.
- Effectively evaluate their own learning and from this see progression throughout their sketchbooks.