Vision and Intent
In our mission to empower our children to exceed here at Sunnybrow, we want to raise aspirations through inspiration and provide our pupils with the opportunities to experience the rich cultural heritage that exists outside of our lovely village and indeed within the wider world. Art & Design provides a visual, tactile and sensory gateway into understanding and responding to the world around us. Through studying a diverse range of male and female artists and designers throughout history, we intend that our art curriculum will develop our children’s critical abilities and understanding of their own and other’s cultural heritages and reinforce our core principle that ‘ordinary people can achieve extraordinary things.’
For us, the Arts embody some of the highest forms of human creativity. We strive to provide an arts curriculum that engages, inspires, and challenges pupils, equipping them with the knowledge and skills to experiment, invent and create their own works of art. As pupils progress through the arts, we intend to give them the skills to be able to think critically and develop a more rigorous understanding of art and design.
We aim to give all children the confidence to express themselves through a range of chosen mediums. Our curriculum provides children with an opportunity to experience all art forms: drawing, painting, 3D designs and print making, and pupils are encouraged to experiment with a range of different materials and techniques to bring their ideas to life. Opportunities to practise art and design techniques when using colour, pattern, texture, line, shape, form and space are embedded across the Art curriculum through the use of individual sketchbooks.
We intend to enrich our children’s experience of the arts and build cultural capital by providing our pupils with opportunities to visit places such as the theatre, museums, art galleries and areas of natural beauty. We have carefully thought about the experiences we want our children to access over their time with us and have created a detailed SMSC plan, which can be found here:
By the time our children leave in Year 6, we intend that they will:
- have improved their mastery of art and design techniques, including drawing, painting and sculpture with a range of materials (for example, pencil, charcoal, paint and clay) and will be confident in sharing their ideas, experiences and imagination
- will be able to talk about, appraise and evaluate the work of great artists, architects and designers in history, describing the differences and similarities between different practices and disciplines, and make links to their own work, using the language of art and design
- have a greater understanding of art and design, including knowledge of how art and design reflects and shapes our local, national and global history, and how art and design contributes to the culture, creativity and wealth of our nation
- acquire the vital knowledge and skills required for the next stage of their learning journey and on into adulthood
Implementation
Throughout the school, Art and Design is taught every two weeks for a 2-hour block (whole afternoon) throughout the year. This ensures children have sufficient time to be able to deeply develop the different skills/techniques we have explored, make their art piece and then have the space to think critically and evaluate what they have made as their final product.
Our Art and Design curriculum follows the scheme Access Art, which is based upon the 2014 Primary National Curriculum in England. It provides a broad framework and outlines the knowledge and skills taught in each Key Stage. Teaching staff plan for lessons using the suggested lessons in Access Art and our progression of knowledge and skills document, ensuring inclusivity and development of pupils of all abilities.
In lessons, children are taught a range of different medias, techniques and reasons for creating art and they look at famous artists and craftsmen to help inspire ideas and creativity.
Access Arts carefully crafted curriculum ensures that pupils are exposed to a wide breadth of art styles, periods of art and key artists throughout their time in primary school. It incorporates the study of both modern and more traditional artists and art styles, enabling pupils to gain both a wide knowledge of the history of art as well as being inspired by modern artists that may be more relevant to their own individual interests.
Art & Design Planning Documents:
Art & Design Long Term Planning
Art and Design Progression of knowledge
By following a clear and comprehensive scheme of work in line with the National Curriculum, it expected that teaching and learning will show progression across all key stages within the strands of Art and Design. Subsequently, more children will achieve age related expectations in Art at the end of their cohort year and Key Stage. It is our aim that children will retain knowledge and skills taught within each unit of work, remember these and understand how to use and apply these in their own art work, whilst beginning to understand what being in ‘artist’ means.
Children will have their own scrapbooks to keep their designs, experiments of their technical skills they have learnt, photographs of final pieces and their evaluations.
We measure the impact of our curriculum through the following methods:
- Learning walks
- Lesson observations
- Pupils discussion and questionnaire
- Staff questionnaire
- Teacher assessment
Teachers assess children’s knowledge, understanding and skills in art and design by making observations throughout lessons, through conversations with children in lessons and looking at the work and what they have said in their annotations and evaluations in their scrapbooks. This helps teachers make a judgement and the data collected will be added on to our tracking system. This will then be looked at by subject leaders to see if there are any gaps to plug.
By the time children leave Sunnybrow Primary School, we want them to have developed a passion for art and design, working both independently and collaboratively. They will have grown in confidence when using a range of tools and techniques, becoming artists, architects or craftspeople that can apply the skills and knowledge that they have developed throughout the years and respond critically to their own and other’s work.
