Art
Art
Intent
At Greasby Infant School we strive to offer our children a range of opportunities to explore and develop their skills in art. We aim to promote an appreciation for artwork, the skills that artists have and how artists have a positive impact on our daily lives. Our children are encouraged to interpret artwork creatively and be inspired to create their own artwork, exploring their imagination, emotions and thoughts about the world around them. Our art curriculum exposes our children to a variety of techniques and media used by artists and gives our children opportunities to become inspired and explore their own individual ideas through the use of a variety of techniques and media. Cross curricular links are made to other areas of the curriculum such as history, design technology, computing and literacy. Our children’s artistic skills are developed and built upon throughout their time at our school, to ensure each individual child reaches their full, unique potential in art.
Implementation
Art at Greasby Infant School encourages our children to appreciate great artists, develop their understanding of skills used in art and the impact of art on our daily lives. Our Key Stage One art curriculum follows the national curriculum and has been designed so that pupils have opportunities to explore a variety of techniques used by artists from different cultures and backgrounds. In EYFS, art is taught using the ‘Expressive Arts and Design’ strand from Development Matters. Our children are supported to achieve the Early Learning Goal in ‘Being Imaginative’ and ‘Exploring and using Media and Materials’. Please see our Art Progression Map for further details.
The coverage of our art curriculum has been planned to ensure key elements are built upon throughout our children’s time at our school. As our children progress through our school, they build on key skills and develop their knowledge and understanding of artists and their work. This enables our children to take inspiration from a range of artists and create increasingly more detailed pieces of artwork themselves, focusing on and developing their use of the principles of art - Line, form, shape, colour, pattern, texture and space. All of our teachers have high expectations for all children in our school and encourage them all to reach their full potential.
When beginning a new project, our children are encouraged to carefully explore chosen examples of a given stimulus or artist. They are then encouraged to experiment with relevant skills and techniques relating to the media. Our children are encouraged to discuss their likes and dislikes about each others’ artwork and refine their artwork as a result of these discussions. Our children are also encouraged to discuss the motivation behind their piece of artwork and why they have chosen to use certain techniques or materials. Our children record their work in individual sketchbooks, which are continuous throughout their time at our school. Their sketchbooks reflect the progress in knowledge and skills that they have made.
Impact
Our art curriculum enables all of our children to make good progress from their starting points to the end of Key Stage One. It encourages our children to develop a love and passion for art whilst developing their skills and knowledge about other artists. As a result of this, our children are well prepared for their next step in their learning journey in art when they move up to Key Stage Two.