Art & Design

Art and Design at Cam Woodfield Junior School 

Intent 

At Cam Woodfield Junior School, we believe that high-quality Art lessons will inspire children to think innovatively and develop creative understanding. Our Art curriculum provides children with opportunities to develop their skills using a range of media and materials. Children learn the skills of drawing, painting, printing, collage, textiles, sculpting and digital media. During this, the children are given the opportunity to explore and evaluate different creative ideas, through replication of notable artists and developing their own artistic style. Children will be introduced to a range of works and develop knowledge of the styles and vocabulary to describe techniques used by famous artists, designers and artisans. The skills they acquire are applied to their cross-curricular theme topics, allowing children to use their art skills to reflect on and explore topics, as well as historical artists and designers, in greater depth. It is paramount that art work be purposeful and pupils should be clear what the intended skills are and have a means to measure their own work against the inspiration of other artists, artisans and designers.  In Art, children are expected to be reflective and evaluate their work, thinking about how they can make changes and keep improving. Throughout the teaching and learning of Art, we spend time on the Retrieval of Knowledge from prior learning before accumulating more Sticky Knowledge, enabling children to progress in their Art knowledge and skills by knowing more, remembering more and being able to do more. 

At Cam Woodfield, children will create sketchbooks to record their observations and use them to review and revisit ideas. Children are encouraged to take risks and experiment and then reflect on why some ideas and techniques are successful or not for a particular project. The expectations for Sketchbooks are: 

Implementation   

Teachers are provided with an Art and Design whole school long term curriculum overview to clearly outline progressive skills for each year group. As part of the planning process, teachers need to plan immersions into different historical or relative artists that link to their theme topic, or if this is not able, they should plan a lesson to cover the skills needed in that year group. Teachers will provide experimentation of new and progressive skills, plan opportunities for the children to plan ahead of their final outcome, scaffold, model and support the children during the creation of their final outcome of art work, as well as evaluative skills. During this process, teachers should be providing and modelling the use of targeted artistic language to support the children’s knowledge and progression in understanding. Adapted learning is also a key focus throughout the school, to ensure all children can access the curriculum. This will be implemented through accessible deliveries, resources, scaffolding, modelling and provision to ensure all children can demonstrate a learnt skill. Each planned sequence of art will include theoretical studies of an artist or a specific period of art focusing, not only on how this has impacted modern art, but how this style of art was influenced or initially inspired.   

Impact 

Our Art Curriculum is high quality, well thought out and is planned to demonstrate progressive skills in all attainment levels, across all year groups. Children’s knowledge of different and diverse historical artists and designers will continue growing, alongside multiple opportunities throughout the school year to celebrate the learning and progression across each year group.