Art
Art is a vital part of the curriculum as it stimulates children’s creativity and imagination. It provides visual, tactile and sensory experiences and offers children a special way of understanding and responding to the world. It encourages learners to become confident in their abilities and gives a validity to their own viewpoints. At Outwoods, we provide a sequenced art curriculum, based on the statutory elements of the National Curriculum. Art lessons are practical, creative and challenging. They encourage children to explore ideas through a wide variety of artists, craft makers, designers and architects, which embrace diversity. Children are inspired by these artists to create their own artwork using a variety of different media: sketching, painting, printing, digital, 3D, textiles and collage. Planning indicates prior knowledge useful to each unit and new learning builds upon this. Children’s use of technical vocabulary is developed. They are shown techniques to develop their own artistic abilities but are also encouraged to discover and think for themselves and take their own path during a task as a sign they are taking ownership of their own learning. Pupils work towards creating individual or group art projects through the processes of generating ideas, making and evaluating. Sketchbooks are a feature of every lesson, with both teachers and children using these as a way to record their ideas, responses, explorations, opinions and evaluations. The use of digital media helps the children to create records of their artwork and, as they progress through the school, this develops to allow them to ‘see’ and ‘collect’ ideas to create a digital sketchbook. Through art, pupils learn to make informed judgements and aesthetic and practical decisions and, as they develop, they are encouraged to think critically and respond to artwork of artists, their peers and themselves. There are opportunities to use a range of learning environments and to work on a variety of differing scales throughout their time in school.