“Art is not just a subject to learn, but an activity that you can practise with your hands, your eyes, your whole personality.” Quentin Blake, Children’s Laureate.
At St Anne’s Primary School, we believe that teaching and learning in art is important because it stimulates enthusiasm, curiosity, creativity, and imagination. It provides children with opportunities to develop and extend skills to express their individual interests and ideas, whilst also contributing to the development of the child emotionally, aesthetically, spiritually, intellectually and socially.
High quality art education equips children with the skills to explore, experiment, create and invent their own work of art, whilst engaging, inspiring and challenging pupils. As artists, children should be able to critically evaluate their work and the work of others, taking influence from well-known artists and adapting their work accordingly. As their skill set progresses, the children should understand how art has changed their landscape, culture and history. Art fires the children’s imagination and is a fundamental means of person expression.
Curriculum Intent
Through our Art curriculum at St. Anne’s, we aim to enable the children to let their light shine by enabling them to become:
- Enthusiastic, curious and independent thinkers through being inspired by specialist artists that challenge and fire their imagination and thinking. Pupils are exposed to different perspectives through observation leading them to ask questions and make personal discoveries.
- Motivated, reflective and resilient learners through the celebration of achievement at a variety of levels both in classrooms and across the whole school. We encourage pupils to develop confidence in their own abilities by self and peer assessing and listening to advice from others to achieve their goals.
- Tolerant and responsible citizens through the understanding that everyone is unique and special. In Art, pupils have access to cultural richness and diversity enabling them to appreciate and enjoy the arts that enrich lives in the world around us.
At St. Anne’s we follow the Kapow Primary Art and design scheme of work. This aims to inspire pupils and develop their confidence to experiment and invent their own works of Art. The scheme is written by experts in their field and designed to give pupils every opportunity to develop their ability, nurture their talent and interests, express their ideas and thoughts about the world, as well as learning about the rich heritage and culture of the British Isles and beyond. Kapow Primary Art and design scheme of work supports pupils to meet the National curriculum end of key stage attainment targets and has been written to fully cover the National Society for Education in Art and Design’s progression competencies.
Curriculum Implementation
The Kapow Primary Art and design scheme of learning is designed with five strands that run throughout. These are:
- Generating ideas
- Using sketchbooks
- Making skills, including formal elements (line, shape, tone, texture, pattern, colour)
- Knowledge of artists
- Evaluating and analysing
Units of lessons are sequential, allowing our children to build their skills and knowledge, applying them to a range of outcomes. The formal elements, a key part of the National Curriculum, are also woven throughout units. Key skills are revisited again and again with increasing complexity in a spiral curriculum model. This allows our children to revise and build on their previous learning. Units in each year group are organised into four core areas:
- Drawing
- Painting and mixed-media
- Sculpture and 3D
- Craft and design
Through delivering Art in this way we can see the progression of skills taught within each year group and how these skills develop to ensure that attainment targets are securely met by the end of each key stage. Kapow Primary Art and design curriculum develops pupil’s knowledge and understanding of key artists and art movements through the ‘every picture tells a story units’ and links to artists through practical work.
The units that we follow, fully scaffold and support essential and age appropriate sequenced learning and allows for cross curricular links with other subjects. Creativity and independent outcomes are robustly embedded into our units, supporting students in learning how to make their own creative choices and decisions, so that their Art outcomes while still being knowledge-rich, are unique to the pupil and personal. Lessons are always practical in nature and encourage experimental and exploratory learning with children using sketchbooks to document their ideas. Lessons are differentiated to ensure that lessons can be accessed and enjoyed by all pupils and opportunities to stretch pupils’ learning are available when required. Knowledge organisers for each unit support pupils in building a foundation of factual knowledge by encouraging recall of key facts and vocabulary.
Curriculum Impact
Kapow Primary’s curriculum is designed in such a way that children are involved in the evaluation, dialogue and decision making about the quality of their outcomes and the improvements they need to make. By taking part in regular discussions and decision-making processes, children will not only know facts and key information about Art, but they will be able to talk confidently about their own learning journey, have higher metacognitive skills and have a growing understanding of how to improve.
The impact of Kapow Primary’s scheme can be consistently monitored through both formative and summative assessment opportunities. Each lesson includes guidance to support teachers in assessing pupils against the learning objectives.
After the implementation of Kapow Primary’s Art and design scheme, our children should leave primary school equipped with a range of techniques and the confidence and creativity to form a strong foundation in art and design
The expected impact of following the Kapow Primary Art and design scheme of work is that children will:
- Produce creative work, exploring and recording their ideas and experiences.
- Be proficient in drawing, painting, sculpture and other art, craft and design techniques.
- Evaluate and analyse creative works using subject-specific language.
- Know about great artists and the historical and cultural development of their art.
- Meet the end of key stage expectations outlined in the national curriculum for Art and design.
Each child in school has a sketchbook showing the children’s experiences and progress in Art and design in the form of their work and photographs. We use the progression of skills and knowledge document so that teachers are able to accurately assess the level of the children’s work. Attainment and progress is tracked using our whole school data programme.
Teachers also use effective questioning to help elicit understanding and provide feedback which leads learners to recognise their next potential steps and how to take them. This could be verbally or could be part of the summary they write in their sketch books.
