Intent

Our Curriculum aims for Art at Lowther Endowed School are to fully meet the National Curriculum as a minimum and ensure that children are taught:

• to use a range of materials creatively to design and make products
• to use drawing, painting and sculpture to develop and share their ideas, experiences and imagination
• to develop a wide range of art and design techniques in using colour, pattern, texture, line, shape, form and space about the work of a range of artists, craft makers and designers, describing the differences and similarities between different practices and disciplines, and making links to their own work. 

Implementation

Central to our curriculum are activities designed to develop pupils’ oracy and vocabulary skills to enable them to use artistic language meaningfully when talking about their work and the work of others. We believe that our art curriculum provides all pupils with an opportunity to express themselves. By providing the children with a rich and varied curriculum, appropriate experiences and opportunities the children’s knowledge and imagination are encouraged through active learning.  The curriculum provides an important and unique way of communicating, seeing and responding to the world around them. Our aims are to ensure that our pupils experience a wide breadth of experiences and have, by the end of each key stage one, long-term memory of an ambitious body of procedural and semantic knowledge.

EYFS

Art in the In the Revised Early Years Foundation Stage, Expressive Art and Design is broken down into two aspects:

• Exploring and Using Media and Materials
• Being Imaginative

We recognise that Creative experiences contribute enormously to children’s development and wellbeing:

• Motor Skills: Many of the motions involved in making art, such as holding a paintbrush or making marks with a crayon, are essential to the growth of fine motor skills in young children, developing the dexterity that all children will need for writing.

• Language Development: Making art, or just talking about it, provides opportunities to practice and extend vocabulary. Children can use descriptive words to discuss their own creations or to talk about what feelings are elicited when they see different styles of artwork.

  Decision Making: We believe that Art and Design education strengthens problem-solving and critical-thinking skills. The experience of making decisions and choices in the course of designing and creating art carries over into other parts of life.

•  

   

  

  Visual Learning: Drawing, sculpting, threading and connecting all develop visual-spatial skills, which are more important than ever. Even before children can read they are taking in visual information. This information consists of cues that we get from pictures or three-dimensional objects from digital media, books and television.

  Inventiveness: When children are encouraged to express themselves and take risks in creating art, they develop a sense of innovation that will be important in their adult lives.

  Cultural Awareness: As we live in an increasingly diverse society, the images of different groups in the media may also present mixed messages. Teaching children to recognise the choices that an artist or designer makes in portraying a subject helps them to understand the concept that what they see may be someone’s interpretation of reality.