Art at Ben Rhydding
Intent
Art at Ben Rhydding follows an Artistic lead curriculum where children are taught skills through different Artists. Each Year group focuses on at least 2 Artists per year following the long-term plan. There is a focus on developing disciplinary knowledge i.e. knowing how to interpret a picture or artists work, substantive knowledge of how to replicate a certain technique, opportunities for practice and critique and opportunities to share and evaluate quality artwork. Through our teaching sequence inspiration, experimentation, evaluation and celebration we capture this intention to create artists who can see the integral beauty of art, appreciate its place in a historical content and see its connection to other subjects.
At Ben Rhydding Primary School we take part in many in school and community art projects. We take part in a house art day once a year where the children work together in mixed year groups to create Christmas posters to decorate our hall. We held an in-school art competition to design a tree for our school library and we have taken part in community art projects and created art work that has been displayed at Ilkley Rail Station.
Implementation
Art is organised into its own learning sequence. Inspiration starts in each year group by analysing a piece of artwork and asking questions to develop curiosity about art. Pupils are given opportunity to experiment and develop initial ideas, recognising that mistakes and ideas will be rejected as part of the artistic journey before having a go at completing their own piece of work in the style of the artist they have been studying about. The children at Ben Rhydding are then taught explicitly how to evaluate their own and critique others works positively. The quality of feedback will first be modelled through dialogic teaching and sentence stems. This is also an opportunity to development growth mindsets and self-regulation as an artist. Lastly celebrating the work as a class, is crucial in validating not only the beautiful work but mapping and evaluating the process each artist went through.
The children build upon their artistic skills throughout their time at Ben Rhydding Primary School, following our long-term progression of skills. These skills lessons are carefully weaved into our Art lessons.
Impact
Through this approach we hope to develop artists who see art within the wider context of other subjects as well as developing an intrinsic love of art itself. The children learn that not all art needs to look the same and that people can have different perspectives of what one piece of art is based on. The skills and knowledge that children gain throughout the long-term plan is vast and can be applied to art work competitions that we run both in school and in the wider community.
Supporting SEND
In all lessons, children have a wide range of knowledge and ability. Whilst recognising this fact, we provide suitable learning opportunities for all children by matching the challenge of the task to the ability of the child. We achieve this through setting common tasks that are open-ended and can have a variety of results. We have a range of resources that support the needs of all our children at Ben Rhydding and children understand not all pieces of art produced need to look the same, all art work is beautiful and unique.
What the pupils say…
“I love learning about primary and secondary colours and creating a colour wheel” – Finlay (Year 1)
“We learnt about Esther Mahlangu and I enjoyed learning about different textures” – Alice (Year 2)
“I like to do Art on the iPad and mix our faces up, it was fun” – Alex (Year 3)
“Art is my favourite lesson, we use different medium to express our different moods” Flo (Year 5)
“We look at Charlie Harper who is a minimal artist. We started to evaluate his work and then had a go ourselves. I even googled about him when I got home as I love art and I’m excited to carry on the topic” – Ava (Year 6)