Our Lady of Grace Catholic Infant School

The All Saints' Trust

Art and Design

Overview 

The Art and Design Curriculum intends to engage, inspire and challenge our children, equipping them with the knowledge and skills to experiment, invent and create their own works of art, craft and design. Our art curriculum is a knowledge rich curriculum. Knowledge, in the realm of art means knowledge not only of artists, designers, architects and their work, but of the artistic concepts that relate to their work shown in different types and styles of art, how these relate to each other in a historical context and how this affects the children’s own use of materials and development of skills.

As our children progress, they should be able to think critically and develop more rigorous understanding of art and design in order to evaluate and adapt their creations based on emotion, meaning and technique. The curriculum is designed to enable children to learn by making connections between the work of artists, architects and designers (which they study critically) and their own work, which they evaluate and relate back to the works they have studied.

Units of work in the curriculum focus on the different concepts in art and different types of art. In this context concepts in art means the different elements of art (line, shape, colour, tone, form, space, visual texture and tone), how an artist combines these elements and produces art in different styles, for example realistic or abstract art. Different types of art means the different media used to make art (e.g. sculpture, architecture or painting), different subject matter (e.g. portraits, landscapes or history painting) and different artistic movements, historical periods or geographical cultures (e.g. impressionism).

EYFS: Our children begin to develop and nurture life skills through experimenting, inventing and creating art. The children will have the opportunity to express their life experiences, and still-life observations, through drawings of their time in and out of school. They will create marks and mixing colour on paper using different tools: brushes, fingers, roller etc. They will experiment with different materials to explore texture and pattern to represent something from their topic for example ‘Did dragons exist?’ where the children use a range of materials to create the look of dragon eggs.

 Year 1 :  Our children will have the opportunity to experience 

 Concepts in Art: Colour, Line, Style

 Types of Art: Paintings of Children, Narrative Art, Architecture, Sculpture, Pointillism, Cubism

 Skills: Painting, Drawing, 3D form, Collage

Process (analysing, exploring, observing, evaluation): verbal, observational and imaginative drawing activities, written and verbal evaluation of own artwork, working with others to produce an artwork

 

Year 2: Our children will have the opportunity to experience 

Concepts in Art: Colour, Shape, Texture, Pattern, Symmetry

Types of Art: Portraits, Landscapes, AngloSaxon Art, Murals, Tapestries

Skills: Painting, Drawing, 3D form, Collage, Textiles, Printing, Mixed media

Process (analysing, exploring, observing, evaluation): verbal, observational, analytical and imaginative drawing activities, written and verbal evaluation of own artwork, working with others to produce an artwork