Intent

At St Mark’s, our aim is to engage and inspire children’s imaginations and spark creativity through an exciting Art and Design curriculum, which provides children with the opportunity to express themselves through a variety of media. We aim to develop each child’s confidence by ensuring they have memorable and meaningful learning experiences.

Our curriculum is planned so that children can experience many different forms of art and see value in the visual world. St Mark’s curriculum carefully considers building upon children’s skillset as they move through the school and children use their prior knowledge to progress.  We aim for our children to build upon their experiences and prior knowledge, and ensure they retain specific ‘sticky knowledge’ that we wish for them to know in the long term. These are guided by our golden threads of artist study, painting and drawing skills and other materials.

Implementation

Within Art and Design units, our children learn the key skills of sketching, painting, printing, collage and sculpture, including work with clay and other malleable media. Our children are able to generate personal ideas and are given the opportunity to experiment with a range of media, such as pastels, charcoal and chalk.

Throughout the key stages, children will practise skills and record their ideas within a personal sketchbook, which will progress through the school with them. The skills and language learnt, can be applied to their cross-curricular learning and will support progression across other areas of the curriculum. Time is planned into each unit to ensure that our children learn to be reflective of their own and others’ art, craft and design work and have the tools to evaluate work sensitively and effectively.

Alongside their practical learning, our children develop a knowledge of famous artists and deepen their awareness of art related vocabulary and concepts.

Intent

Our children develop the key skills and knowledge as set out in the Art and Design section of the National Curriculum. Children are proud of their work and this pride is reflected in their sketchbooks and the creative outcomes on classroom displays.

Our school Art display also celebrates the children’s work in Art and Design and showcases a range of skills and styles from across the whole school, further enabling children to feel a huge sense of pride.