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Intent: What skills and knowledge do we intend our children to gain?
At Balladen Primary School, we value Art as a subject, to inspire and develop our children’s creative thinking and to develop their cultural, spiritual and moral understanding. We encourage all our children at Balladen to express their thoughts and emotions in a safe and appropriate way. It is embedded in everything we do and Art is a fantastic medium, which can support and empower our children to do this. We teach our children to be reflective of their work and respectful of others. Our school motto in art, ‘Making mistakes is how we learn’, creates a safe space for our children to explore, experiment and take risks without the fear of getting it wrong which is the basic essence of what art is and can offer to our children.
We take inspiration from our class artists, learning more about them and their style, which we then apply to our own work. We plan and teach sequenced art lessons based on skills, using a range of media and give the children opportunities to apply the skills learned in other areas of the curriculum, making the lessons relevant and meaningful. This year we are focusing on developing our drawing skills and our use of sketchbooks so that over time clear progression can be seen as the children build on their skills each year.
We plan to enhance our Art curriculum further by inviting local artists into school to lead workshops and by providing our children with the opportunity to display their artwork in our school gallery. Parents and carers will be invited to sessions and to view our gallery to admire the children’s work and see the progression across the year groups.
We aim to develop the skills in each media over the next few years to embed our understanding as staff and to fully support our children in developing the key skills needed to ensure progression.
Implementation: How has the curriculum been developed, how is it taught and how is it assessed in order to support our children to build their knowledge and apply that knowledge as skills?
At Balladen Primary School we teach Art through a skills based curriculum. The skills are developed and built upon each year so that progression can be seen clearly across the school. All children are exposed to a range of media each year giving them the opportunity to explore, develop and embed their skills and understanding of that media, from our youngest children in Early Years to our eldest in Year 6. During each lesson progress will be assessed by children annotating their work, reflective self and peer feedback. The children will be aware of the skills they are developing and will be able to look back on what they achieved before. Through, self and peer evaluation the children will discuss what they have done well and what they will need to continue to practise and develop in order to continue to improve their skills in that particular area. The teacher will also make suggestions and refer back to previous modelling to support the children. It is also incredibly important however, that our children feel empowered and open to making mistakes. In Art there is no right or wrong as it is all a matter of interpretation. While drawing, for example, may not be a strong area for one pupil, they may find sculpture easier to grasp. It is this openness and acceptance that will allow our children to take risks in Art. It is when we take risks that our learning can truly flow and all our children can become artists.
Impact: What outcomes will our children achieve as a result of the curriculum they have received?
At the end of each year the children will have been exposed to a wide variety of different media, giving them the opportunity to use it in a different way or for a different purpose and develop a range of skills. This will build upon their prior knowledge of what they can do when using this media. Our lessons are accessible for all of our pupils and they are proud of what they have achieved. They will be able to look back at their earliest work in their sketch books and see the progress they have made.
As we move up through the school the children will begin to develop their own preferences of media and styles as they will have been exposed to them frequently throughout their time in school.
Our approach of being open and accepting of mistakes will not only help to develop our children’s creativity within Art but will extend to other areas of their lives. There are many key life skills that will be developed through our attitude and teaching of Art which will support our children as they move on after Balladen, such as respecting others and their work even if we don’t like it personally, or carrying on after something goes wrong or when things do not turn out how we planned. This resilience is a key skill which our children will need throughout their lives.