Art & Design at Northbrook is led by Mrs Goldfarb.
Intent
At Northbrook, we believe that art is central to helping children understand about the world around them, as well as helping them to understand themselves.
We are dedicated to giving our children access to art from a diverse range of backgrounds to help inspire them to think critically and appreciate the subject at its fullest. Through a sequence of well-planned art lessons, we want to prepare our children to enter later life with a love of creativity, alongside a carefully structured set of artistic skills. We feel children should have access to a wide range of experiences that help them to believe that everyone is creative and enjoy art in all of its forms.
Our curriculum is designed to blend together the direct teaching of artistic skill, creative thinking and use of materials and medium based practice as well as specific teaching around artistic styles and movements with the wider links to learning around curriculum areas e.g. Remembrance Day, The stone age, Egyptians, our Local Environment and the study of particular artists. We explore the roles of artists, craftspeople and designers through different time periods and aim to achieve our own personal best in every piece of artwork we create.
Our Curriculum Drivers
-
HEART Values – Art at Northbrook is a chance to express our individuality and feel happy in ourselves. Through their Art and Design lessons, children are engaged, inspired and challenged, encouraged to experiment, invent and be aspirational with their thinking. Throughout their time at Northbrook, children will be encouraged to think critically about their own work as well as the work of others, demonstrating the importance of empathy and teamwork. We learn to respect the opinions and views of others, as well as respect for a range of different cultures.
-
Literacy and Language – We use our “introduction to the artist” sessions to learn to articulate our feelings around art and understanding of techniques. We use STEM sentences to build analyse and evaluate our work and the work of artists. We are articulate in our thinking, allowing us to express our opinions to others.
-
Community and Cultural Diversity- Through our Art and Design curriculum, we explore a range of artists of different cultures, genders and ethnicities. Art speaks from a community or person’s identity and can help us to understand and empathise with our similarities and differences.
-
Global Citizenship – Many areas of our Art and Design curriculum encourage us to consider our environment in our learning. This helps us to respect the earth and the variety of people living in it and we learn to use it to communicate about causes we care about.
Implementation
Our curriculum is designed to blend together the direct teaching of artistic skill, creative thinking and use of materials and medium based practice as well as specific teaching around artistic styles and movements with the wider links to learning around curriculum areas e.g. Remembrance Day, the stone age, Egyptians, our local environment and the study of particular artists such as Banksy to reinforce global issues.
Through our art units, we explore the roles of artists, craftspeople and designers through different time periods, different cultural backgrounds and different artistic movements and aim to achieve our own personal best in every piece of artwork we create.
Our curriculum is thoughtfully planned to engage and inspire all our learners. Our long term and medium-term plans map out the Art & Design themes covered each half term for each key stage, as well as the critical knowledge children need to know and remember. An example of this is below:
These plans define what we will teach to ensure an appropriate balance and distribution of work across each term. Art & Design objectives have been carefully linked to these themes to make the learning relevant and interesting within a realistic context.
Early years foundation stage
We believe that all learning begins in EYFS. Our curriculum is closely linked with the Early Years Framework to ensure children in EYFS are achieving those early skills within the subject, which will then enable them to continue to progress in art as they move through school. Additionally, planning and teaching in Art & Design is fully inclusive ensuring that all children can access the curriculum at their level. Skills and related vocabulary are progressively built upon as children journey through our school. Cross-curricular links are emphasised, enabling the children to apply their skills and knowledge in other areas of the curriculum.
Knowledge
Our whole school art curriculum is designed to provide children with opportunities to learn and revisit key art knowledge, we carefully map out the types of knowledge below to make sure children’s learning is progressive and provides every child the chance to succeed.
Substantive - facts about artists, movements and themes.
Procedural - development of techniques such as drawing and painting.
Disciplinary - how children want to develop their own ideas and thoughts into a composition.
Experiential - In contrast with substantive knowledge, experiential knowledge is implicit (rather than explicit) knowledge gained through experiences e.g the feel of clay that is the right consistency
Enrichment Activities
Each year, we create our Northbrook Primary Art Gallery,
Impact
Children are assessed against our curriculum endpoints through a variety of different methods: small assessment tasks, retrieval practice, low-stake quizzes, classroom responses and teacher judgements based around the year group end points for art.
Leaders monitor teaching and learning through pupil voice, staff questionnaires as well as book looks and learning walks and using the online app See Saw to record evidence of learning. The development of the children in school is also monitored through daily informal conversations.
As a result of our whole curriculum, we expect to see all children achieve well by developing knowledge and skills across the curriculum. But we understand that art brings more than this, and aim to ensure that all children will:
-
develop lifelong learning behaviours that help them continue to create and explore in art.
-
appreciate the possibility of art as a career and give them the opportunity to have success in modern Britain.
-
be responsible global citizens and courageous advocates of our community through the HEART Values we have instilled in them during their time in school.
-
leave our school, fully equipped for the next stage in their learning.
