Art at Felbridge Primary School

What are we aiming for?

Art and design at Felbridge Primary School aims to inspire pupils and develop their confidence to experiment and invent their own works of art. The scheme we have chosen to support our children to become motivated, inquisitive and talented artists is called Kapow Primary. It is written by experts in their field and designed to give pupils every opportunity to develop their ability, nurture their talent and interests, express their ideas and thoughts about the world, as well as learning about art and artists across cultures and through history. Kapow Primary’s Art and design scheme of work supports pupils to meet the National Curriculum end of key stage attainment targets.

How we achieve our aims

The Kapow Art scheme of work is designed with four strands that run throughout.

These are:

• Generating ideas
• Using sketchbooks
• Makings skills, including formal elements (line, shape, tone, texture, pattern, colour)
• Knowledge of artists
• Evaluating and analysing

Units in each year group are organised into four core areas:

• Drawing
• Painting and mixed-media
• Sculpture and 3D
• Craft and design

Kapow’s units cover each of the National Curriculum attainment targets and also ensure the pupils’ progression and development of skills and knowledge throughout each year group to ensure that attainment targets are securely met by the end of each key stage. The units fully scaffold and support age-appropriate sequenced learning, and are flexible enough to be adapted to form cross-curricular links with our own school’s curriculum, where appropriate, to help broaden the children’s depth of interest, knowledge and understanding. Creativity and independent outcomes are robustly embedded into our units, supporting students in learning how to make their own creative choices and decisions, so that their art outcomes, whilst still being knowledge-rich, are unique to the pupils. Lessons are always practical in nature and encourage experimental and exploratory learning with pupils using sketchbooks to document their ideas.

Lastly, one of the benefits of our chosen scheme, Kapow Primary, is that it supports teachers with their individual artistic abilities as each unit of lessons includes teacher videos to develop teachers’ subject knowledge- we can all learn to improve our artistic techniques! We also use pupil videos, created by subject specialists, to help pupils to see art techniques modelled by experts as we- including teachers- work together on our techniques, helping to ensure the delivery of Art is of the highest quality.

What will our approach result in?

Kapow Primary’s curriculum is designed in such a way that children are involved in evaluation and decision making about the quality of their outcomes and improvements they need to make. By taking part in regular discussions and decision-making processes, children will not only know facts and key information about art, but they will be able to talk confidently about their own learning journey and have a growing understanding of how to improve. Each lesson includes to assess pupils against learning objectives and teachers at Felbridge Primary School will also assess pupils against the progression map on a yearly basis.

Pupils will be able to produce creative work, exploring and recording their ideas and experiences; be proficient in drawing, painting, sculpture and other art, craft and design techniques; be able to evaluate and analyse creative works using subject-specific language and lastly will know about great artists and the historical and cultural development of their art. Therefore, by the time our students leave primary school they will be equipped with a range of techniques and the confidence and creativity to form a strong foundation for their Art and design learning at Key Stage 3 and beyond.

Supporting us to understand and respect diversity

As part of their art lessons pupils will be able to experience art from all over the world. Children will come into contact with art associated with culture and with artists from a range of different cultures and backgrounds which are woven throughout a sequence of lessons. Through this, children learn and understand differences between themselves and people from other backgrounds.

We also recognise the fact that we have pupils of differing ability in all our classes, and so our scheme provides differentiated guidance which is available for every lesson to ensure that lessons can be accessed and enjoyed by all pupils and there are also opportunities to stretch pupils’ too. We provide suitable learning opportunities for all pupils by matching the challenge of the task to the ability of the child. We achieve this through a range of strategies:

• setting common tasks that are open-ended and can have a variety of responses
• setting tasks of increasing difficulty where not all pupils are required to complete all tasks
• providing a range of challenges with different resources
• using additional adults to support the work of individual pupils or small groups.

SMSC opportunities in art

• Social- children will engage in group projects which require social skills such as leadership, teamwork, and different roles within the team. They must be able to disagree amicably and respect others’ opinions.
• Moral- Children can assess each other’s work. They are taught that critical assessment isn’t negative, and that they need to be careful with their choice of language so that they are encouraging and constructive.
• Spiritual- Art links with RE very closely through religious symbols. Art is often part of RE units and therefore it encourages spiritual thinking and growth. 
• Cultural- The children are exposed to many different styles of art and artists from all over the world.