Art
We have specialist art teachers who work at Blue Gate Fields Junior across the week bringing their expertise and originality from their own work into our school.
Our art curriculum (which encompasses the objectives outlined in the national curriculum) is taught through a keen focus on observational drawing as the starting point for all work. Our children are taught to look, look and look again. The teaching and appreciation of the arts flows throughout the curriculum, with it deepening understanding of other curriculum areas, in particular the humanities.
Understanding grows progressively through a spiralling of understanding. Each child's development as an artist is unique and follows their own journey of understanding.
The basis of our art teaching is direct observation, with drawing as a foundation. We also use paint, printing, collage and clay to develop the children's skills and enjoyment, as well as their creativity, self-expression and confidence.
The pupils may be drawing household objects or plants on the table, or a person in front of them. Whatever the subject, they will be focusing on looking, assessing, comparing and revising as they go. The structure, volumes, spaces, scale, distance, textures and surfaces of those forms – in their surroundings – will be all grappled with, consciously or not.
Vegetables have weight – they sit or rest on a surface in a certain way; they cast shadows, and shapes are created around them. A standing or seated figure leans or inclines; the weight is distributed in certain ways which affect the overall shape and dynamism of the whole figure. When drawing in the school playground, pupils assess relative distance and scale…they gain a sense of space, and of their own place within this familiar environment.
Art planning is responsive to the cultural and environmental climate of the moment; the school endeavours to make full use of the opportunities that our locality and London can offer. It aims to chime with the wider school curriculum, yet not follow it without question when links feel tenuous. Its rationale makes it, by nature, changing and changeable although its roots are firmly in an understanding of what good arts education looks like.
Our children experience many trips to galleries , exhibitions and museums throughout their time at Blue Gate Fields Junior.
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