Subject Overview
WORKING ARTISTICALLY
INTENT
Our Art curriculum is designed to engage, inspire and challenge pupils, whilst equipping them with the knowledge and skills to be able to experiment, invent and create their own works of art. As pupils progress, they should gain a deeper understanding of how art and design reflects and shapes our history, and how it contributes to the culture, creativity and wealth of our world.
We want our children to love art and design! We want them to have no limits to what their ambitions are and to grow up wanting to be llustrators, graphic designers, fashion designers, curators, architects or printmakers.
We want to prepare them for the opportunities, responsibilities and experiences of later life. We want our children to use the vibrancy of our great city as inspiration, to learn from other cultures and respect diversity. To that end, we have carefully selected a wide range of unique and diverse artists, craft makers and designers for children to study.
IMPLEMENTATION
Eldon Primary work alongside the CUSP partnership and uses its resources to support the teaching of Art and Design.
This is organised into blocks with each block covering a particular set of artistic disciplines, including drawing, painting, printmaking, textiles, 3D and collage. Vertical progression in each discipline has been deliberately woven into the fabric of the curriculum so that pupils can revisit key disciplines throughout their Primary journey at increasing degrees of challenge and complexity.
In addition to the core knowledge required to be successful within each discipline, the curriculum outlines key aspects of artistic development in the Working Artistically section. Each module will focus on developing different aspects of these competencies. This will support teachers in understanding pupils’ development as artists more broadly, as well as how successfully they are acquiring the taught knowledge and skills
WHAT DO WE TEACH?
EARLY YEARS
Children use what they have learnt about media and materials in original ways, thinking about uses and purposes. They represent their own ideas, thoughts and feelings through design and technology, art, music, dance, role-play and stories.
KEY STAGE 1 & 2
HOW DO CHILDREN LEARN?
Class timetables have been built to ensure a broad and balanced curriculum.
Subjects have been blocked in a spaced retrieval model to support catch up and to build the frequency of Art and wider curriculum subjects. This maximises learning time
Art has been timetabled in an extended session to enable children to have time to develop depth and to save time setting up/ packing resources away.
RETRIEVAL PRACTICE
Retrieval practise is planned into the curriculum through spaced learning and interleaving and as part of considered task design by the class teacher. Teaching and learning resources and provided for class teachers so they can focus their time on subject knowledge and task design.
KNOWLEDGE NOTE
VOCABULARY
The units are supported by vocabulary modules which provide both resources for teaching and learning vital vocabulary and provide teachers with Tier 2 and 3 vocabulary with the etymology and morphology needed for explicit instruction details relevant idioms and colloquialisms to make this learning explicit.
We aim to provide a high challenge with low threat culture and put no ceiling on any child’s learning, instead providing the right scaffolding for each child for them to achieve.
IMPACT
Our Art and Design curriculum is high quality, well thought out and is planned to demonstrate progression. Our assessment systems enable teachers to make informed judgements about the depth of pupil learning and the progress pupils make over time. If children are keeping up with the curriculum, they are deemed to be making good or better progress. In addition, we measure the impact of our curriculum through the following methods:
HOW DO WE KNOW THAT THE LEARNING HAS STUCK?
Exemplification is available and can be used to inform assessment of pupil outcomes and to support teachers in developing their own subject knowledge. They demonstrate the expected standard against which teachers can assess pupils’ work.
The assessment of pupils is formative based on pupil outcomes and questioning from each lesson. The following can be used to assess pupils’ knowledge and application of artistic techniques and their understanding and use of artistic vocabulary.
Expectations for each block are made explicit in plans, e.g. At the end of this block pupils will know marks can be made using a variety of drawing tools and will be able to select appropriate tools and make a range of marks.
The Point of Reflection section specifies the expected outcome for each lesson.
The Questions for Assessment section in each block provide specific questions to be used with pupils to elicit their level of understanding of tools, techniques and effects, e.g. What happens if you change the size of the mark?
The Oracy and Vocabulary tasks enable teachers to evaluate pupils’ ability to:
- use artistic language effectively;
- explain artistic techniques and processes; - evaluate their own and others’ work.
The vocabulary quiz provides an opportunity for teachers to assess pupils’ deeper understanding and application of artistic and technical vocabulary covered in the block.
The best form of assessment in art is in-action, while pupils are working. This helps us to understand pupils’ development as artists, rather than their ability to produce a prescribed end outcome. By encouraging pupils to articulate their thinking and reflections, we can understand which aspects of artistic development they may require additional teaching in and reshape teaching to support this.
QUESTIONS FOR ASSESSMENT
A series of self evaluation questions are provided for each unit
PUPIL BOOK STUDY TELLS US:
1. What impact is our CURRICULUM having?
What effect is the curriculum architecture having?
2. Does teaching support LONG-TERM LEARNING?
Is the evidence-led practice really being deployed at a classroom level, or is it superficial?
3. Do tasks enable pupils to THINK HARD and CREATE LONG-TERM MEMORY?How impactful are tasks, and do they help pupils to think hard and generate learning?
