Art is a place for children to learn to trust their ideas, themselves and explore what is possible.

- Maryann F Kohl 

Our school vision is that as a Catholic school, God is at the heart of all we do. We believe that each person is made in His image, deserving to be treated with respect and dignity.  Through the teaching of Art and Design we show respect, love and care for everyone and everything, there is harmony between pupils and each individual child realises their full potential, spiritually, academically, physically, socially and emotionally.

The whole earth is filled with awe at your wonders; where morning dawns, where evening fades, you call forth songs of praise

Psalm 65:8 

Art at St. Thomas More Catholic Primary School

Intent

At St Thomas More our curriculum is based on the key principles and beliefs of our Bishop. We ensure that through the lens of faith we develop individual, unique people and form the foundations of them being able to contribute to society. This is reflected in our Art and Design Curriculum.

Our teaching of Art and Design at St Thomas More Catholic Primary School aims to enable children to develop the substantive and disciplinary skills detailed in the National Curriculum while still affording them the creative freedom to express themselves as individuals.

The National Curriculum for Art and Design aims to ensure that all pupils:

• produce creative work, exploring their ideas and recording their experiences
• become proficient in drawing, painting, sculpture and other art, craft and design techniques
• evaluate and analyse creative works using the language of art, craft and design
• know about great artists, craft makers and designers, and understand the historical and cultural development of their art forms

Our curriculum is designed to build confidence and skills year on year and allow children of all age and abilities to experience success. This links to the vision across the curriculum and is embedding our spiral curriculum design. We incorporate art and design across all subjects where possible and fully realise the potential that this subject provides in relation to overcoming barriers (particularly those created by language) and in enabling our pupils to realise their full potential spiritually, academically and emotionally.

We use Kapow Primary’s Art and Design scheme of work. This scheme aims to inspire pupils and develop their confidence to experiment and invent their own works of art. The scheme is written by experts in their field and designed to give pupils every opportunity to develop their ability, nurture their talents and interests, express their ideas and thoughts about the world, as well as learning about arts and artists across cultures through history.

Kapow Primary’s Art and Design scheme of work supports pupils to meet the national curriculum end of key stage attainment targets and has been written to fully cover the National Society for Education in Art and Design’s progression competencies.

Implementation

In the Early Years Foundation Stage, Art and Design and Design and Technology are covered through Expressive Art and Design. At St Thomas More we know that it is this development of children’s artistic and cultural awareness that supports their imagination and creativity. The planned continuous provision resources and activities across EYFS ensure regular opportunities to engage with the arts, enabling the children to explore and play with a wide range of media and materials.

In Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2, Art and Design and Design and Technology are taught alternatively for half a term each. The subjects are timetabled to be taught once per week across both KS1 and KS2. The teaching and learning in our creative art sessions can be characterised as an inclusive differentiated approach where we aim to facilitate children of all abilities to experience a sense of achievement and pride through the work that they produce. We ensure clear scaffolding for pupils whilst building in challenge too; aiming for all children to take ownership of their learning.

Our lessons are formed around the ‘Kapow Primary’ Art and Design scheme of work. We judge this to be a robust scheme that incorporates many cross-curriculum links. The Kapow Primary Art Scheme of work is designed with five strands that run throughout. These are:

•          Generating ideas

•          Using sketchbooks

•          Making skills, including formal elements (line, shape, tone, texture, pattern and colour)

•          Knowledge of artists

•          Evaluating and analysing.

Units of learning are sequential, allowing children to build their skills and knowledge, applying them to a range of outcomes. The formal elements, a key part of the national curriculum, are also woven throughout units. Key skills are revisited again and again with increasing complexity in a spiral curriculum model. This allows pupils to revise and build on their previous learning. Units in each year group are organised into four core areas:

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

Each unit is fully scaffolded and support age appropriate sequenced leaning, and are flexible to be adapted to form cross-curricular links. 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 knowledge rich are unique to them.

Lessons are always practical in nature and encourage experimental and exploratory learning with pupils using sketchbooks to document their ideas. Differentiated guidance is available for every lesson to ensure that lessons can be accessed and enjoyed by all pupils and opportunities to stretch pupils’ learning are available when required.

Kapow Primary supports teachers who may lack confidence in their own artistic abilities. Pupil videos created by subject specialists help pupils to see art techniques modelled by experts, to ensure the delivery of Art is of the highest quality. Each unit of lessons includes multiple teacher videos to develop subject knowledge and support ongoing CPD.

Impact

This successful approach to Art and Design lessons at St Thomas More Catholic Primary School will result in engaging, fun, high-quality Art lessons that promote a love, respect, care and curiosity for the World. The frequent, continuous and progressive Art and Design learning will embed the National Curriculum aims ensuring the children are making good or better progress.

Our school vision is that as a Catholic school, God is at the heart of all we do. We believe that each person is made in His image, deserving to be treated with respect and dignity.  Through the teaching of Art and Design we show respect, love and care for everyone and everything, there is harmony between pupils and each individual child realises their full potential, spiritually, academically, physically, socially and emotionally.

The impact of Kapow Primary’s scheme is constantly monitored through both formative and summative assessment opportunities. Each lesson includes guidance to support teachers in assessing pupils against the learning objectives. A spreadsheet is used which includes the learning outcomes for children with secure understanding and those working at greater depth enables teachers to keep records of formative assessments of each child.

After the implementation of Kapow Primary’s Art and Design scheme, pupils should leave primary school 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.

The expected impact is that children will:

• Produce creative work, exploring and recording their ideas and experiences.
• Be proficient in drawing, painting, sculpture and other art, craft and design techniques.
• Evaluate and analyse creative works using subject – specific language.
• Know about great artists and the historical and cultural development of their art.
• Meet the end of key stage expectations outlined in the national curriculum for Art and Design.

In this art lesson we had to choose and combine materials based on their texture to create our own printmaker. We had lots of fun using different materials such as pasta, bubblewrap, fabric, straws and many more to create different textures. We can't wait to make prints with them. 

This week in Art we continued our Sculpture and 3D unit all about Interactive Installation Art. We learnt about the installation work of artist Cai Guo-Qiang; considering the display space and scale of an artwork; creating a scaled-down version of an installation similar to Guo-Qiang’s gunpowder drawings. We used boxes to create our spaces. We used tea bags soaked in paint and glitter among other art materials. 

In Art Club this term we have focused on an artist - Vincent Van Gogh. To continue our artistic work we have chose to focus on his art piece ‘A Starry Night’. To look further at the image we focused on a small part of the image to draw ourselves. We cut the image up and tried to replicate the image. We then put our individual sections together to recreate the ‘Starry Night’ picture. 

In Art Club this term we have focused on an artist - Vincent Van Gogh. To begin we researched him as an artist learning about his life. We put all this information into an Artist Portfolio decorated with our interpretation of some of his art work. 

For Arts Week this year, each class read the book by Linda Kranz. We talked about the beautiful messages depicted in the book. 

'Appreciate art. It's all around you'

'Look for beauty wherever you are'

'No matter how you look at it, there is so much to discover'

'If you make a wrong turn, circle back'

Each child then painted a stone. Some designed a unique fish, while others painted key words or messages onto their stone. 

On Thursday 22nd June, St Thomas More's Feast Day, we came together as a whole school community to create a mosaic of St Thomas More. Every single person in our school placed a tile onto a design.

2021-2022