Art

Our Aim

The national curriculum for art and design aims to ensure that all pupils:

• Produce creative work, exploring their ideas and recording their experiences.
• Become proficient in drawing, painting, sculpture and other art, craft and design techniques.
• Evaluate and analyse creative works using the language of art, craft and design.
• Know about great artists, craft makers and designers, and understand the historical and cultural development of their art forms.

Art is a very popular subject at Fell Dyke and we provide pupils with the opportunities to express their own creativity through a range of art and design experiences. We aim to arm children with the knowledge and skills to experiment, invent and create their own works of art.

Curriculum Organisation

In the Foundation Stage, children have experiences of art from the very beginning of their Fell Dyke learning journey. Within the EYFS children are immersed in open ended, playful exploration where children explore the early skills of drawing, painting and sculpture within continuous provision and adult led activities. There is a focus on children’s exploration of a wide range of media and materials. The children have a wide range of opportunities to find out about, think about and work with colour, texture, shape, space and form in two and three dimensions.

In Key Stages 1 and 2 the art curriculum is organised into units of work that build skills progressively as the children move through school. At Fell Dyke we have mixed age classes and our curriculum runs over a two-year cycle. The children develop substantive and experiential knowledge through a combination of opportunities for repeated practice and new projects. Drawing and painting are central to this, with units taught in every single year group. We aim to provide the children with the knowledge and skills to experiment, invent, plan and create their own works of art. Key drawing skills are regularly revisited in each art unit.

We aim to provide a curriculum to ensure that the children have the key skills and knowledge to:

• Produce creative work, using a range of materials, explore their ideas and record their experiences through the use of sketchbooks.
• Use drawing, painting and sculpture to develop and share their ideas, experiences and imagination
• Use a range of materials creatively to design and make products.
• Develop a wide range of art and design techniques in using colour, pattern, texture, line, shape, form, tone and composition.
• Learn about the work of a range of diverse artists, craft makers and designers, describing the differences and similarities between different practices and disciplines, and making links to their own work.
• Have the skills and language skills needed to evaluate their own and others work.
• We have built strong links with the Shipley and Laing art galleries, the Access Art network and Artsmark. Visits to local galleries enrich the children’s experience of art.

Knowledge, Progress and Assessment

Assessment in art at Fell Dyke takes account of all aspects of pupils’ learning and achievement. This includes, not only what pupils make, but also how they make it, what skills they acquire and what they know about the tools and materials they use. We consider both the quality of the products that pupils make and the skills they exhibit as they use tools, materials and processes.