Intent

At­­­­ St Marks a love of art is nurtured within all.  Our imaginative and diverse art curriculum enables children to see art’s connection with the wider world. Throughout their time at St Mark's children have opportunities to explore and experiment with a wide variety of materials and techniques providing a solid foundation for their own creative expression.  

Our goal is to expose our children to a range of influential local and global artists and craft makers from past and present and become more historically, culturally and socially aware. Children explore their own unique ideas and use art as a purposeful form of expression.

Through art, children develop their own sense of identity and become reflective artists whilst evaluating and appreciating work using the appropriate artistic vocabulary.  Our aim is for children to become confident, independent artists in their own right, generating personal artistic outcomes.

Each project comes with a list of key vocabulary linked to the material, technique and suggested artist or movement for the particular project. All projects have cross-curricular links, enabling natural over-teaching to further enrich and consolidate learning.

Throughout children's artistic journey, they have opportunities to create projects through painting, drawing, collage, sculpture, printing and digital media. Projects encompass a range of artists and artistic genres, reflecting children's cultures and the wider world. As they progress through school, children revisit media and skills giving them the opportunity to demonstrate prior knowledge and develop proficiency in handling familiar materials and tools.

As children discuss their own work and the work of others, they are encouraged to critically evaluate art and design and use this knowledge to improve their own work.

Implementation

All Art and Design projects follow the structure of the Design Process. This structure ensures that children have opportunities within each project to:

• Define: children plan what they will make
• Research: children collect information (visiting galleries, explore books, collect materials from nature, speak to people, explore artefacts/examples)
• Analyse: children sketch and draw, take photographs and collect inspiration to decide which idea is working best
•  Develop ideas: consider materials, tools and techniques and what will work best for an idea
• Present: children present their ideas to peers for evaluation and appreciation
• Improve: children implement feedback to finalise ideas and produce their final piece

Impact 

Our Art curriculum is high quality, well thought out and is planned to demonstrate progression to ensure age-related attainment at the end of each Key Stage. Upon completion of each unit teachers will assess children against the progression of skills document.

Each project’s clear structure allows pupils to demonstrate:

• Research skills and experimentation
• Development of ideas through sketching and drawing
• Evaluation and appreciation of their own and other’s work through gallery events and peer discussion
• Realise a final outcome using a variety of media and techniques

Termly assessment will take place to track children’s progress against age-related expectations for art.