Subject Leader: Mrs R. Todd

Our Art curriculum is bespoke to our school. During art lessons, our school encourages children to produce creative work, by exploring their ideas and recording their experiences, whilst intertwining aspects of our Catholic Social Teaching curriculum throughout each year group. We provide a broad and balanced curriculum which ensures the progressive development of knowledge and skills within Art & Design. Children are given the opportunity to work with a wide variety of appropriate media in two and three dimensional form. Our children engage with Art & Design through the five strands of drawing, painting, printing, textiles & collage and 3D form. We teach our children that mistakes often lead to the best outcome, that risks are worth taking and that great enjoyment can be found in learning and sharing with others. Our hope is that our children leave us with creative confidence in their own ideas. 

Children evaluate their own work and analyse creative works of others. The children are given the opportunity to study work of great artists, craft makers and designers and are taught how art has influenced historical and cultural development around the world.

Throughout the Early Years Foundation Stage, our 3-5 year olds are taught art & design throughout their Physical Development, Expressive Arts & Design, Communication and Language and Writing curriculum areas. From Years 1-6, children work in their own sketch book. These are used as working documents to record their observations, carry out artist research and use them to review and revisit ideas. 

Our Intent at OLSG in Art & Design is that our children: 

• Are engaged, inspired and challenged, having skills and knowledge to experiemnt, invent and create their own world of art, craft and design.
• understand how art and design both reflect and shape our history and contribute towards the culture, creativity and wealth of our country.
• Become proficient in drawing, painting, printing, textiles and collage and 3D form.
• Are able to 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 in their art forms. 
• Develop self-confidence, self-esteem and positive attitudes toward each other, school and learning by providing opportunities for responsible self-directed activities and personalised learning.
• Can evaluate and assess the work they create through annotations, peer evaluation, reflection and self-evaluation.

This is implemented by:

• Clear and sequential learning
• Ensuring that each art unit is adapted and planned for in accordance to the length of term
• Displaying a range of recording strategies to record the children's learning in sketchbooks
• Structured evaluation of each talk, self assessing skilled being developed as well as outcome.

The impact of learning Art & Design is assessed by:

• Our children's sketchbook outcomes
• Initial lesson as a form of assessment before the unit starts
• Our children being able to talk about their learning and the knowledge acquired throughout each unit
• Verbal questioning throughout all learning opportunities
• Retrieval opportunities throughout the unit of learning
• Weekly retrieval opportunities outside of the art lesson. 

Curriculum Overview

Below is a sample of our updated Art & Design curriculum

Useful Links

Please follow the 'Primary homework help' link below to access a wide range of information about famous artists. You could use this page to explore and learn about new artists or to aid and develop your focus artist research from school. 

Please use the BBC Bitesize links below to access tutorials for art & design skills including; drawing, painting, sculpture, textiles, colour, shape, pencils, pastels and inks, textiles, famous artists and many more to further develop your KS1 and KS2 art & design skills. 

Our Summer Art Exhibition

Each summer term, we host our whole school art exhibition where we display a range of different units of work and skill focuses completed throughout the year. Work from Nursery-Year 6 is displayed. Please take a look at the superb work completed by our children, and presented by our wonderful staff. We are so proud of this event and love being able to showcase our talented children's work! 

We have some fantastic examples of our children's artwork displayed around our school! Please take a look at some of the brilliant display and sketchbook work that the children in our school are creating.

Early Years Foundation Stage

Nursery

This term, Nursery have worked so hard to paint their favourite toy from the book 'Just Like Jasper'. They had to look very carefully at colours and shapes to make sure we could spot which one they had painted. Our Nursery children have also been looking at how to mix colours and whilst exploring this, enjoyed getting messy and creative by painting their hands to print their mixing journey. As well as this, they've also been busy in their junk modelling area, making rockets, whilst learning about Bonfire Night.

Reception

This term, our Reception children have created some wonderfully vibrant space art using chalks, self portraits with paints and have worked hard to listen to instructions to draw and paint the snowmen from their text, 'The Snowman'.