Art at Hollyfast Primary School 

 Vision

At Hollyfast it is our aim to deliver an ambitious art curriculum, that excites and engages our children. It will provide opportunities for our children to take risks and develop a range of skills based on 6 key disciplines of art. We believe this allows them to explore Art in a number of forms and transfer skills taught through cross-curricular opportunities. Underpinning our Art curriculum, are carefully planned key skills and knowledge that are developed year-on-year.  A Hollyfast Artist will study a range of diverse artists, crafts makers designers and architects from different periods of history. This is a way for our children  to take inspiration from key artists and makers, providing them for a starting point, on which they can begin to develop their own style. Final outcomes and artwork created by our children is shared with our school  and wider community through gallery style displays as we value the importance of celebrating our children's work.

Our Approach

At Hollyfast, we value the Arts and its ability to capture and inspire all. We have developed a skills- based and knowledge rich curriculum that helps focus learning for stronger outcomes to ensure our children develop and embed a range of skills. We view it as a fundamental part of a child’s development and education, valuing its wide reaching benefits that stretch beyond the classroom walls such as; motor skills, language skills, social skills, decision-making, risk-taking, and inventiveness. Vocabulary is carefully planned and embedded in our curriculum. This allows children use the language accurately and effectively to communicate their ideas, intentions, reflections and outcomes.

Each child has a sketchbook that is used as a creative tool to document each child's creative journey. Sketchbooks are used to gather, collect, explore experiment and reflect. It is a space in which they collect and comment on artwork from “the greats”. . Across both key stages, our Art lessons follow the same structure to ensure consistency: Explore (artist/maker hook), explore/technique building, design, create and evaluate. Our Art units follow this structure to ensure the children can collect ideas for own art pieces; develop and document skills through technique lessons. Then linked to the key art elements taught, the children will design through various drawing or digital art opportunities and then create, putting their knowledge and skills to the test. At the end of each art unit, the children will work collaboratively and decide on how best to display work to our community, reflecting and evaluate their artwork, moving learning forward. 

Through opportunities on offer at Hollyfast; such as strong teaching , creative workshops with local artists and crafts people and trips our children can demonstrate that Art and Design has fair reaching benefits that will stretch into their future.  Assessment in Art and Design is through tracking opportunities conducted by teachers during the learning process in order to modify teaching and learning activities to support children and improve children's outcomes .