Art
"Art has the role in education of helping children to become like themselves instead of more like everyone else." Sydney Gurewwitz Clemens
At Potters Gate and St Andrews School we believe that pupils have the right of freedom of expression. Through high quality art education that engages, inspires and challenges, pupils will develop the skills and knowledge to create and experiment.
Pupils will develop a sense of fellowship and community through collaborative projects and work with local artists and institutions within the context of a World Craft Town. Pupils will also experience the cultures of others through looking at the work of specific artists, workshops in school and visits to institutions outside our local area.
In our classrooms, children feel safe and trusted to make decisions and to express themselves without the fear of being wrong or different to their peers. Pupils are given time to communicate and reflect using meta-cognitive skills and are given the opportunity to learn from their peers, celebrating differences in views and ideas.
Pupils will leave our schools resilient, and confident to express their ideas as they process their experiences of the world around them.
With the exception of Early Years, our children all use sketchbooks to document their learning and creative journeys; where they have the opportunity to record, review and revisit their ideas. We feel these are a vital part of developing our children to work as artists, craft makers and designers.
We use the progression documents from the NSEAD to help inform planning, where the curriculum is sectioned into four different progress objectives:
Generating ideas - the skills of designing and developing ideas
Making - the skills of making art, craft and design
Knowledge - knowledge of both technical process and cultural context
Evaluating - the skills of judgement and evaluation
Our own progression of skills document then supports our curriculum development further, showing how drawing, painting, sculpture, printing, collage, digital media and textiles are developed over time. These documents can be found in the curriculum area of our website. We use Access Art to support the planning, and this is slightly adapted to support Creativity & Cultural Development, Spiritual Development, Community & Courageous Advocacy, Health & Wellbeing and Aspiration as well as the development of British Values (democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and mutual respect and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs ).
Each year the Year 6 children take part in a collaborative art project. This involves the children learning new skills and then leaving behind the work they have created as a gift. This is displayed for them to see if ever they return and for the enjoyment of the rest of the school.
Above Image - Heat prints which the Year 6's created with local artists Hermione Thomson, a local textile artist. They created banners inspired by their 'Generation Restoration' Topic- Pollution. They re-used fabric scraps and recycled materials to create patterns and prints. They then used the cut shapes to work in small teams to plan compositions and effective contrasting background colours.
Above image - Year 5 at Potters Gate and Year 2 Pupils at St Andrews have had the chance to work with local textiles artists, Charlotte Karin to explore different Botanical dye techniques. Year 5 also explored different ways to join fabric. The children had to learn to work in groups and really had to be resilient as they explored new skills. It was like alchemy, watching our fabric change with the botanical dyes.
We have been awarded the Artsmark Silver Award! 