Intent
At Dalton School, we believe that high-quality Art lessons will inspire children to think innovatively and develop creative procedural understanding. Our Art curriculum provides children with opportunities to develop their skills using a range of media and materials.
Children learn the skills of:
- drawing,
- painting,
- printing,
- collage,
- textiles,
- 3D work and
- digital art
and are given the opportunity to explore and evaluate different creative ideas.
Children will be introduced to a range of works and develop knowledge of the styles and vocabulary used by famous artists. The skills they acquire are applied to their cross-curricular topics, allowing children to use their art skills to reflect on and explore topics in greater depth; for example, by sketching historical artefacts in detail, researching geographical locations to support their work on landscape painting or using art as a medium to express emotion and thought to enhance their personal, social and emotional development. Many areas of art link with mathematical ideas of shape and space; for example when printing repeating patterns and designs and thinking about 3D shapes to support structures.
It is paramount that art work be purposeful; be this as a means of expression or to explore the styles of other artists that inspire our own work. Pupils should be clear what the intended outcomes are and have a means to measure their own work against this.
In Art, children are expected to be reflective and evaluate their work, thinking about how they can make changes and keep improving. This should be meaningful and continuous throughout the process, with evidence of age-related verbal and written refection. Children are encouraged to take risks and experiment and then reflect on why some ideas and techniques are successful or not for a particular project.
Implementation
In ensuring high standards of learning and teaching in Art, we implement a curriculum that is progressive throughout the whole school. Art is taught as part of a topic, focusing on knowledge and skills stated in the National Curriculum. At Dalton School, we ensure that Art has the same importance given to it as the core subjects, as we feel this is important in enabling all children to gain a full and balanced curriculum that will aid their skills as well as develop their social, moral, spiritual and cultural understanding.
The Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) follows the ‘Development Matters in the EYFS’ guidance, which aims for all children in Reception to develop expressive arts and design through ‘exploring and using media and materials’ and ‘being imaginative’ by the end of the academic year.
Impact
At Dalton School, our Art curriculum is high quality, well thought out and is planned to demonstrate progression. If children are keeping up with the curriculum, they are deemed to be making good or better progress. In addition, we measure the impact of our curriculum through the following methods:
- A reflection on standards achieved against the planned outcomes;
- A celebration of learning which demonstrates progression across the school;
- Pupil discussions about their learning; which includes discussion of their thoughts, ideas, processing and evaluations of work.
Take a look at some of our amazing work and classroom displays.
