Art and Design

Subject leader: Katie Kellett

“You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.” –Maya Angelou

At Allanson Street Primary School, we believe that teaching and learning in Art and Design is important because it stimulates creativity, imagination and inventiveness. The purpose of Art and Design is to give children the knowledge, skills and concepts necessary for them to express responses to ideas and experiences in a visual or tactile form. It fires their imagination and is a fundamental means of personal expression.

It is our hope that Art and Design will enable the children to communicate what they see, feel and think through the use of colour, texture, form, pattern and different materials and processes. We encourage children to become involved in shaping their environments through art and design activities. Through this, we want our children to learn to make informed judgements and aesthetic and practical decisions. Children explore ideas and meanings through the work of different artists from varied backgrounds and cultures as well as developing an awareness and appreciation of the beauty found within our diverse world.

Wherever appropriate, Art and Design is linked to other areas of the curriculum and gives children the opportunities to develop and reinforce specific art knowledge and skills. We take pride in displaying the children’s art throughout the school for all to see thus boosting the children’s ability to really view themselves as artists.

What will our children learn and why?

At Allanson Street Primary School, we shape our Art and Design curriculum to ensure it is fully inclusive to every child. Our aims are to fulfil the requirements of the National Curriculum for Art and Design by providing a bespoke, broad and balanced curriculum, ensuring the progressive development of artistic knowledge and skills and for the children to develop a real love for art.

Our Art and Design curriculum aims to promote curiosity and a love and thirst for learning. It is intended to be ambitious and to empower our children to become independent and resilient – like all curriculum areas. The curriculum is designed to provide children with a range of opportunities to develop different artistic skills in many situations throughout their journey through our school.

We hope that by engaging, inspiring and challenging pupils, we can equip them with the knowledge and skills to be able to experiment, invent and create their own works of art. As pupils progress, they should gain a deeper understanding of how art and design reflects and shapes our history, and how it contributes to the culture, creativity and wealth of our world.

We want them to have no limits to what their ambitions are and to grow up believing that they can be illustrators, graphic designers, fashion designers, curators, architects or printmakers.

We hope to prepare them for the opportunities, responsibilities and experiences of later life. We want our children to use the vibrancy of our local cities as inspiration, to learn from other cultures and respect diversity. To that end, we have carefully selected a wide range of unique and diverse artists and designers for children to study and have planned opportunities for children to visit the Art galleries and museums of Liverpool and surrounding areas as well as to work with local artists and experts.

Our children will be given opportunities to develop their skills in areas such as drawing, painting, printing, sculpture, collage and digital media. Throughout their time at Allanson Street, our children’s artistic learning will encourage them to work with a wide range of materials and tools. Our curriculum is designed to revisit genres and mediums throughout the key stages, ensuring that children can develop their skills and knowledge. We expect our children to use visual language and artistic vocabulary (for example, line, shape, pattern, colour, texture, form) to analyse the work of others and to express emotions, interpret observations, convey insights and accentuate their individuality in their own work. We aim for the children to draw confidently and adventurously from observation, memory and imagination. We expect our children to show independence, initiative and originality in order to develop their creativity.

How will we ensure that our children leave us equipped with the knowledge and skills needed to flourish in the next stage of their learning journey and beyond?

Our Art and Design curriculum has been mapped from EYFS to Year 6 to ensure that every child receives a broad, balanced, and progressive curriculum.

Art and Design is an essential part of learning in EYFS as it is delivered through taught Expressive Arts and Design sessions and throughout a wide range of opportunities within provision. The Art and Design aspects of the children’s learning relate to the objectives set out in the Development Matters framework.

In Key Stages One and Two, Art and Design is taught in line with the National Curriculum as an independent subject once a week across three half terms. It is planned to ensure a rich education in which pupils develop a depth of knowledge and a broad range of skills, allowing them to make links across concepts and topics. Each Art and Design lesson, across both key stages, is delivered using the same blueprint of ‘Prior Learning’; ‘New Learning’; and ‘Reflection’. Lessons are organised in this way so that children continuously build and revisit knowledge, ensuring that it is remembered and stored in their long-term memory. Each Art and Design unit also follows the same format of six lessons, designed to allow children to explore and appreciate an artist or art movement, practise, develop and apply different skills, before creating a final piece of art and then evaluating not only their artwork, but also the artistic process shown in their sketchbooks.

Knowledge organisers are used to support the learning about artists and their work, about the knowledge of materials and processes that will be used and to provide useful advice and reminders about certain skills.

Educational visits are a key part of our Art and Design curriculum and we encourage all year groups to seek opportunities to visit local galleries and museums, work with artists from around the country and to take part in workshops. We also provide our children with the chance to celebrate their art in the wider world and to show pride in their artwork through engaging with different competitions and exhibitions throughout the year.

How will our Art and Design curriculum make a difference for our children?

We believe our children will:

• Have thoroughly enjoyed learning about art and design, therefore encouraging them to undertake new life experiences now and in the future.
• Appreciate the work of many different artists and creators from around the world and throughout different periods of history, giving them the opportunity to learn about the world and most importantly, about people in many walks of life.
• Be able to talk confidently about their own art, the things they create and also the work of others with passion and pride.
• Be comfortable giving and accepting feedback in order to continuously strive to be the best that they can be and develop skills in a positive way.
• Find freedom and enjoyment through expressing themselves in many different ways and through experimenting with skills and mediums.
• Develop progressively as they move through the school, not only to enable them to meet the requirements of the Early Years Framework and the National Curriculum but to prepare them to become competent artists and designers in secondary education and for life as an adult in the wider world.

*Image Acknowledgements: icons8.com, www.iconfinder.com, pexels-zaksheuskaya-1616403.jpg