Subject Rational

At St Mary’s School art, craft and design has a significant and valuable role to play in the overall ethos of this school.

Art is an ongoing process through which all children are given opportunities to develop specific skills, knowledge and understanding to enable them to work in variety of media, style and form.  It enables children of all abilities to use their creative imagination to achieve their potential with guidance and given criteria.  Children work individually and within a group to develop the social and personal skills.  Art is taught discreetly with links to the connected curriculum, retaining its creative base and its skills and techniques.  This gives children the opportunities to develop specific art skills and reinforces skills already established.

At St Mary’s we want children to:

• Enjoy an active involvement in art, craft and design.
• Have the confidence as well as the skills and experience necessary to communicate their ideas through their artwork.
• Have the opportunities to experience a broad and balanced range of art activities and show progression within these experiences.
• Have opportunities to learn about art from different times and cultures.
• Become visually literate and able to identify and apply the key elements of art.
• Develop the ability to analyse and make informed critical judgements about their work and the work of other artists, crafts people and designers using appropriate language.

How we teach Art 

Art is planned as part of our connected curriculum and outcomes form part of our showcase displays alongside writing and pupil voice.  The art teaching sequence involves three phases; playing and exploring, planning and developing and applying and evaluating.  Teaching through these phases allows children to engage with the work of other artists and try out techniques, learning new skills before planning and creating their own piece. 

Each phase focus on one unit per long term (Autumn, Spring and Summer) and so within the two year rolling programme children will have experienced all five units as well as an extra unit chosen by the class teacher.  The units covered are; Drawing, painting, 3D, printing and textiles.

How Art is assessed at St Mary’s

Art is assessed using teacher judgement against the specific skills and knowledge taught that term, in line with the overview created by the subject leader.  This assessment is divided into skills and knowledge. Children are also given the opportunity to evaluate their own learning as well, and use sentence stems to support this.