Intent

The National Curriculum aims to ensure that all pupils produce creative outcomes which explore their ideas and record their experiences. At St Lawrence CE Primary School, we believe that all children should be given the opportunity to engage in creative subjects which have no set rules; as Henri Matisse once said, ‘Creativity takes courage’. 

During their time at St Lawrence, we aim for all children to deeply explore the different and varied aspects of art through focuses projects and cross curricular links where appropriate. It is important that children are inspired and are encouraged to ask questions about their own and others work. Across both Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2, pupils will learn about the work of a range of artists and designers – equipping them with ideas on how they can invent and create their own works of art in response. Due to this, we feel passionately that children should have the opportunity to work alongside professional artists and designers and we are fortunate to have been able to invite in members of the community to work with our students. These moments are truly valuable and memorable.

As Picasso once said that, ‘All children are artists’; we wanted to acknowledge this at St Lawrence by giving our children the opportunity to explore art together as a whole school family through different themes or an artist focus. This yearly gives opportunity to see progression across our whole school and inspires our children to work together to create a corridor display that celebrates artwork from every year group.

Implementation

Through engaging and inspiring lessons, pupils are taught the key skills and techniques within: Drawing, College, Painting, Sculpture, Clay, Textiles and Printing. As a school we believe each of these areas to have a significant role to play in providing an effective art and design experience. With this in mind, we decided to dive deeper to ensure that all children explore these themes in detail through having a yearly focus: Year 1 – Collage, Year 2 -Painting, Year 3 – Sculpture, Year 4 – Clay, Year 5 – Textiles and Year 6 – Printing. This structure allows both teachers and pupils to unpick the skills and techniques within these elements through well-structured and sequenced lessons and a careful study of artists and designers. Alongside these focused projects, children will return to the key concept of drawing, exploring this in varied ways throughout their time at St Lawrence. They will have the opportunity to build on their prior knowledge and skills - ensuring progress across their time at school.

Impact

Children have a love of learning at St Lawrence CE Primary and Art is an area in which they have demonstrated their passionate and interest. They have fun and are keen to explore and challenge themselves in lessons. Their sketchbooks are a special resource which captures that learning journey from Year 1 to Year 6. Both children and staff alike are able to monitor progress which is extremely special. Through their sketchbook teachers are able to assess progress and monitor the standards of ARE and GP within their classes. Children have the ability to reference their final outcomes through photographs, evidence their skills across the different aspects of art as well as documenting their analytical thinking about the artists they study. During art lessons themselves, teachers are keen to model the skills taught which allows them to pick up misconceptions when the children are also working.

At St Lawrence CE Primary School we take great pride in displaying the children’s art work around the school as a whole school display and within individual year group classrooms too. Parents are invited in during ‘Family Times’ to see this for themselves and classes often visit each other’s  ‘Art Galleries’ to celebrate one another.  We are very proud of the artwork that our children produce and are keen to share this within the local community by entering examples of this into the ‘Alton Arts Competition’ at the beginning of each year.