Art & Design
Intent Statement
At Witton-le-Wear Primary we value the importance of art in our broad and balanced curriculum as we believe that it contributes to the development of the whole child. We aim to nurture the children’s love of art and make our lessons engaging for all pupils in order to inspire and challenge them, as our children are the artists and designers of the future.
Our children are encouraged to express their thoughts and ideas creatively and to appreciate the world around them. We are fortunate that our school in located in a beautiful part of the world which can be used as a basis for creating artwork. Low Barns, a local nature reserve is within walking distance that can be used for inspiring work based on natural forms.
The children are given the opportunity to grow their understanding and appreciation of other artist’s work as this in turn helps them to develop their own skills in art and design. Our curriculum exposes the children to a wide variety of artists, both local and from around the world. We believe it is important for the children to make connections through art with our local history so artists including Bob Olley are studied as this enables them to learn about our mining history in the Northeast. We also benefit from our close links with the Auckland Project; this enables our children to explore, analyse and reflect on art such as Zurbaran Spanish masterpieces, this is something we believe is very important as children can gain more from seeing art work first hand.
Starting in our EYFS unit, the children are given the opportunity to explore using a wide variety of materials to create artwork in child-initiated time and through directed tasks. This gives them the firm foundation of basic skills. The knowledge, skills and understanding of the key areas of drawing, colour, texture, form, printing and pattern that start in Early Years and are then revisited, developed and built on as they move into KS1 and KS2 through the topics they explore each term. Artist’s work is used throughout many of these topics to both inspire and encourage the children to reflect on techniques, in turn developing their own art. The children’s vocabulary and language of art and design is also developed during this process. We believe that our art curriculum gives the children the confidence, resilience and skills to transition into Art in Key Stage Three.
Curriculum Map
