The curriculum at Sandridge provides a high-quality art education that inspires and equips every child to become skilled artists, critical thinkers and creative individuals. Our aim is to nurture children’s imagination, curiosity and self-expression through engaging and purposeful experiences. We strive to develop their cultural capital by exposing them to a wide range of styles, techniques and traditions, promoting an appreciation and understanding of the rich artistic heritage of the United Kingdom and beyond.
Our art curriculum is designed to offer a broad and balanced range of experiences, including drawing, painting, sculpture, printmaking, textiles and digital art. We ensure that our curriculum covers a variety of art forms, techniques and mediums, ensuring that children have opportunities to explore and develop their skills in various artistic domains. Lessons are carefully planned to incorporate art history; exploring the works of renowned artists, both from the past and present and enable children to make connections between their own artwork and the wider cultural context.
We recognise that art learning is a progressive process and provide a clear and logical sequence of skills development across all year groups. Our curriculum builds upon prior learning, allowing children to demonstrate progress and deepen their understanding of art concepts, skills and processes. We ensure that children have ample opportunities to refine their techniques, experiment with different materials and express their creativity in increasingly sophisticated ways as they move up through the school.
Art in Early Years is taught through both child and adult-initiated learning. This approach allows children to have creative freedom while also learning skills such as cutting with scissors and correctly holding resources such as pens and paintbrushes. Our Early Years setting is a stimulating learning environment that inspires our pupils and enables them to make creative use of a full range of resources. Children have the opportunity to use both the indoor and outdoor learning environments which are equipped with a wide choice of resources to fire their imaginations. Pupils will have the opportunity to paint, draw, cut, stick, collage, build and be introduced to a wide variety of artists whilst in the foundation stage. During adult-initiated learning, skills and knowledge often have cross-curricular links to deepen pupil’s prior knowledge.
Across KS1 and KS2 pupils will have the opportunity to develop their skills and knowledge of drawing, craft and design, sculpture and 3D art, painting and mixed media. Our curriculum is planned to enable our pupils to revisit skills each year which allows for previous learning and skills to be reinforced and deepened. In KS1, pupils will investigate sculpture and 3D art through the use of paper art (building tube towers and giant spider models) and building clay houses. Our craft and design units allow pupils to explore woven art through thread, weaving, fibre art and printing. During the painting and drawing units children will explore colour mixing, pencil skills and have the opportunity to create collages.
In lower KS2, children will investigate abstract space and shapes, light and dark and make cross curricular links to other subjects. For example, Year 3 have a craft and design unit that focuses on creating Ancient Egyptian scrolls. Pupils will continue to develop their drawing skills in upper KS2 and will be taught units of art that allow them to develop their critical thinking. Year 5 will focus on portraits in their painting and mixed media unit of work, interactive installations in sculpture and 3D and architecture in craft and design. Year 6 will have the opportunity to conduct an artist study, continue refining their drawing skills with a link to Mayan art, begin to develop photography skills and create a sculpture to reflect themselves.