At St Michael’s Art is enriching, engaging and challenging, it stimulates creativity and imagination. Our Art curriculum is reinforced by the National Curriculum and Early Learning Goals, teaching through our Explore Curriculum.

Our curriculum encourages our children to explore a range of artists, craft makers, designers and architects to further understand how art can reflect and shape history.  Expanding their knowledge of the artists of the world and embracing their diversity which reflects our own multicultural school community, that celebrates the variety of cultures.  Our Art curriculum will empower them to be themselves and explore their own individuality as well as discovering and respecting others on their journey from EYFS to year 6.  At St Michaels we are committed to providing our children with the knowledge and skills to experiment, explore, take risks, invent and create.  Primarily we want our children to have a positive attitude towards Art and know they are artists, craft makers, designers and architects.  Our curriculum will supply them with a wealth of vocabulary that allows them to express their thoughts and ideas effectively and think critically to develop a deeper understanding of Art and Design.

At St Michael’s we seek to ensure that our teaching reflects the children’s needs, which emphasises the particular importance of designing and making.  The purpose of our Art education is to give pupils the skills, concepts and knowledge necessary, for them to express their responses to ideas and experiences in a visual or tactile form. It fires their imagination and is a fundamental means of personal expression.

The national curriculum for art and design aims to ensure that all pupils:

• Produce creative work, exploring their ideas and recording their experiences;
• Become proficient in drawing, painting, sculpture and other art, craft and design techniques;
• Evaluate and analyse creative works using the language of art, craft and design;
• Know about great artists, craft makers and designers, and understand the historical and cultural development of their art forms.

At St. Michael’s, we encourage our children to demonstrate key attributes of an Artist by:

• Being curious and showing a willingness to explore the world of creativity
• Having confidence to draw feely from memory, imagination and close observation
• Using skills and previously learned knowledge to select techniques, equipment and materials to produce a piece of Art.
• Having a knowledge and understanding of artists and designers from different periods of history and linking to other areas of our Explore Curriculum
• Being about to reflect, analyse and critically evaluate their own work and the work of others through an artists’ lens.
• Using key vocabulary to be able to ‘Talk Like an Artist’

In order to widen and deepen our knowledge of Art and to see and appreciate famous pieces of Art, each year group visited the Walker Art Gallery. We were lucky enough to take part in fascinating workshops and could make links to what our Art focuses were for the term.

Some of the Art we observed were:

• Medieval and Renaissance Art

• Impressionism and Post-Impressionism

• British Art from 1880 to 1950

Here is a link to The Walker Art Gallery – https://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/walker-art-gallery

As part of staff development, we were lucky enough to participate in an Art Workshop, led by Gill Taylor. Our staff had the opportunity to practice and develop different Art skills, that we then delivered to our children. This expanded our knowledge and the knowledge of our learners. The skills we focused on were:

• Continuous line drawing
• Observational drawing
• Shading
• Printing with ink

Tate Kids is a useful website allowing children to make, pay games and quizzes and explore a range of art, artists with tons of ideas and ways to recreate some of their masterpieces.

Scrap Colouring is a fun website allowing children to create digital art. If they love to colour and create patterns they will have lots of fun playing around with scrap colouring.

Artsology is a website with lots pages of games and puzzles for you to have fun with art.

Just click a button below to View any document, you will then have the option to Download or Print the file. You can access all of our policies and reports on the website. Please contact the school if you would like any paper versions of our documents.