Intent

At Shortbrook Primary School we are dedicated to providing children with a broad and balanced art and design curriculum.  We want our children to enjoy and engage in creative activities that express their individual thoughts, ideas and imagination.  Art and craft are an essential subject within our school, where all children can be inspired to produce and invent their own high-quality works of art, craft and design.  In art our children will be equipped with the confidence to share their ideas, experiences and creativity, whilst respecting the views of others.  Art and design allows our children to express emotions and also enhance their personal and social wellbeing in a caring environment where there are no right or wrong results.  Through this subject our children learn how art and design outline history and contribute to our culture and that of other nations.

Implementation

Shortbrook Primary School's art and design is based on the National Curriculum and closely linked to the broad, enriched, balanced topics within our school.  It enables us to provide a well-structured approach to art, design and creativity. Staff are provided with excellent training days where they can work closely with other professional artists to further develop their skills, so children can receive the highest quality teaching.

New skills and techniques are carefully modelled by the teacher to enable children to confidently and independently choose their own materials and tools, equipping them to explore and develop their own ideas.

Here at Shortbrook Primary school we aspire to achieve excellence in fine motor control which is pre-requisite of good handwriting.  This is done through carefully planned drawing skills-based lessons, where children produce drawings using varying types of shading, line, tone and pattern.  They will be given opportunities to learn and develop in the skills of painting, printing, collage. textiles, model making and digital art, being able to use the skills they have acquired to other cross curricular subjects. These include activities such as sketching historical artefacts,  drawing maps, diagrams, painting  landscapes and design and technology  Children are given chance to evaluate their own work and that of their peers, celebrating success using resilience by identifying areas for improvement and making changes. They will be introduced to vocabulary used for different genres of art work and have the ability to use these terms when discussing or explaining their work. 

The children’s art books follow them throughout their progression through school. This way, teaching staff create a collaborative style of learning with the pupils-allowing them to take an independent and creative role in the development of their skills.

Our children will study the works of other artists from the past and present and will be encouraged to become critical thinkers.  They will observe the different style and materials artists have used and implement this within their own designs and creations.

A key assessment criteria is used for art and design which is devised to assess how children are developing and what is considered age appropriate.

Impact
As a result of our art curriculum, children at Shortbrook Primary School have always had a positive attitude to their art. Year upon year we see that children are building on their skills, enabling them
to produce high quality end pieces across all mediums. Teaching staff allow the progression of lessons to inform their assessments at the end of each term.
We continue to identify art as a subject which supports our children embedding the wider curriculum into their long-term memory. Pupil voice reports have shown that children’s application of art skills to
creating pieces linked to their topic has allowed them to deepen their understanding and knowledge.

Cycle 2 coming soon