Art & Design

Art and Design at Cam Woodfield Junior School

Intent

At Cam Woodfield Junior School, we believe that high-quality Art lessons will inspire children to think innovatively and develop creative 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, sculpting and digital media. During this, the children are given the opportunity to explore and evaluate different creative ideas, through replication of notable artists and developing their own artistic style. Children will be introduced to a range of works and develop knowledge of the styles and vocabulary to describe techniques used by famous artists, designers and artisans. The skills they acquire are applied to their cross-curricular theme topics, allowing children to use their art skills to reflect on and explore topics, as well as historical artists and designers, in greater depth. It is paramount that art work be purposeful and pupils should be clear what the intended skills are and have a means to measure their own work against the inspiration of other artists, artisans and designers.  In Art, children are expected to be reflective and evaluate their work, thinking about how they can make changes and keep improving. Throughout the teaching and learning of Art, we spend time on the Retrieval of Knowledge from prior learning before accumulating more Sticky Knowledge, enabling children to progress in their Art knowledge and skills by knowing more, remembering more and being able to do more.

At Cam Woodfield, children will create sketchbooks to record their observations and use them to review and revisit ideas. 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. The expectations for Sketchbooks are:

• There is no marking policy- the entire sketchbook represents a learning journey for the children as opposed to each individual dated lesson.
• Although lessons will have a learning objective, this does not need to be written in books. Children should be able to discuss the skills they have learnt.
• Instead of formal marking, teachers should circulate and offer constructive feedback to pupils that can form part of their evaluations.
• There are no set rules for presentation- it should be about encouraging children to develop their own individual style. Some children will need more guidance than others.
• Make sure children aren’t typically using more than 2 pages per lesson just to avoid using their entire sketchbook too quickly.
• Felt tip pens should NOT be used in Art lessons.
• Sketchbooks are for developing Art skills within your lessons- they are not for pupils to draw in during wet play
• Sketchbooks may be used to support or complete other areas of learning, for example eliciting descriptive language for a character or setting in English; reflecting on the use of Artwork to depict religious ideas.

Implementation  

Teachers are provided with an Art and Design whole school long term curriculum overview to clearly outline progressional skills for each year group. As part of the planning process, teachers need to plan immersions into different historical or relative artists that link to their theme topic, or if this is not able, they should plan a lesson to cover the skills needed in that year group. Teachers will provide experimentation of new and progressional skills, plan opportunities for the children to plan ahead of their final outcome, scaffold, model and support the children during the creation of their final outcome of art work, as well as evaluative skills. During this process, teachers should be providing and modelling the use of targeted artistic language to support the children’s knowledge and progression in understanding. Differentiation is also a key focus throughout the school, to ensure all children can access the curriculum. This will be implemented through differentiated deliveries, resources, scaffolding, modelling and provision to ensure all children can demonstrate a learnt skill. Cam Woodfield Junior School will implement whole school targeted artist learning, with the Art and Design subject lead delivering a new artist or designer each term, in which the children will research and create an inspired art piece. At the end of each whole school topic, the school will create an art gallery, open to the public, to display the children’s knowledge and creative skills.

Impact

Our Art Curriculum is high quality, well thought out and is planned to demonstrate progressional skills in all attainment levels, across all year groups. Children’s knowledge of different historical artists and designers will continue growing, alongside multiple opportunities throughout the school year to celebrate the learning and progression across each year group. Children from all backgrounds and attainment levels will show progression across all skills and as a result, Cam Woodfield Junior School will display the capabilities of working towards and achieving a Bronze Artsmark Award.