“Every child is an artist. The problem is to remain an artist once they grow up.” – Pablo Picasso.

Art at Norfolk Community Primary School

What is Art?

Art is a powerful form of human expression that connects directly with our senses. It allows individuals to communicate their thoughts, feelings, and ideas visually, creating works of importance that reflect both individual creativity and the wider world.

Art at Norfolk

At Norfolk Community Primary School, we intend for all our children to have the opportunity to express their unique creativity through our art curriculum. We have developed our own bespoke art curriculum that ensures a clear progression of skills and consistently builds on previous learning.

Our curriculum is built around four core elements that empower children to see themselves as creators: skills, knowledge, exposure, and evaluation.

To ensure depth of learning across these elements, our curriculum alternates each half term with Design and Technology (DT):

• The Three Main Art Terms: Lessons focus deeply on the core disciplines of Painting, Drawing, and Sculpture.
• The DT Half Terms: We run specialized Art Days that focus explicitly on Printing, Digital Media, and Collage.

Through this structure, children use personal sketchbooks to practice techniques, record observations, and plan their ideas, with each topic working towards a meaningful final artwork.

The Four Elements of Our Curriculum

🛠️ Skills

We aim to motivate and challenge pupils, equipping them with the tools and skills to experiment, invent, and create their own works of art, craft, and design. All pupils will learn specific, progressive skills for drawing, painting, printing, sculpting, and collage. Sketchbooks are used to record observations, practice these techniques, and build confidence before creating well-thought-out final pieces of work. These skills are built upon year-on-year as children increase in confidence and ability.

🧠 Knowledge

Where possible, we link our artistic projects to the wider curriculum to make learning meaningful. Inspiration is drawn from learning about famous artwork, both historical and contemporary. Crucially, pupils are taught that art is subjective—different people may love or hate the same piece of art, and that is okay! This open mindset helps build up confidence in children who might otherwise think they are "no good at art."

👁️ Exposure

Pupils are exposed to a rich range of comparable and contrasting artists throughout their school career, broadening their cultural and creative knowledge. Key artists are intentionally revisited across different year groups to embed long-term learning.

📊 Evaluation

Pupils are encouraged to evaluate and analyse creative works, developing a rich artistic language. As pupils progress, they learn to think critically and develop a more rigorous understanding of art and design, regularly assessing both their own work and the work of their peers. Through this process, we work to identify disciplinary knowledge and help children understand what it truly means to be an artist.

Our Core Art Strands

Our bespoke curriculum applies these four elements across distinct artistic paths, enhanced by our immersive Art Days:

• ✏️ Drawing: Children explore mark-making in all its forms, experimenting with line, tone, and texture. They study masters of line like Pablo Picasso and Paul Klee, learning to use pencils, charcoal, and pastels to master perspective, shadows, and close observational drawing.
• 🎨 Painting and Mixed Media: Children develop essential painting skills, including colour mixing, washes, and exploring warm versus cold tones. They experience a variety of styles—from the Post-Impressionism of Anne Estelle Rice to the Pointillism of Georges Seurat and the abstract art of Kandinsky—working with watercolors, acrylics, and canvas.
• 🗿 Sculpture and 3D: Children investigate ways to express ideas in three dimensions. They construct and model with clay, wire, and Modroc, learning techniques like pinch-potting, cross-hatching with slip, and padding structures with newspaper to build Greek busts, Mayan masks, and human forms showing movement.
• 🖼️ Printing, Digital Media & Collage (Art Days): During DT terms, children dedicate whole days to exploring specialized media. They practice block printing and intaglio copper etching, create digital paintings and stop-frame animations, and design textured collages inspired by artists like Eric Carle and Eileen Agar.

Art in the Early Years (EYFS)

In Foundation Stage (FS1 & FS2), our youngest artists begin their journey by exploring textures, colours, and shapes freely. Through open-ended creative play, children learn to:

• Explore and Mix: Investigate a variety of materials to build their own ideas, safely joining different objects and mastering early colour mixing using powder paints.
• Express Emotions: Use drawing and painting to represent complex ideas like loud noises or fast movements, explicitly learning how to show happiness, sadness, and fear in their artwork.
• Engage in Drawing Club: Build a rich vocabulary through storytelling and animations, watching teachers model magic-coded drawings before creating their own imaginative pictures.
• Build Physical Control: Take part in "Squiggle Whilst you Wiggle" sessions, developing the crucial gross and fine motor skills needed for controlled mark-making, sculpture joining, and early letter formation.

Our Goal: Every child leaves Norfolk Primary with the confidence to express themselves, the resilience to experiment with new techniques, and a lifelong appreciation for the diverse world of art and design.

What It Means to Be an Artist: Our Disciplinary Journey

A vital part of our bespoke curriculum is teaching disciplinary knowledge—helping children understand the role, value, and meaning of art in society. As outlined in our Art and Design diciplinary_2.docx framework, our pupils explore three big questions in increasingly deep ways as they grow:

1. What is Art? (Purpose & Meaning)

2. What Do Artists Do?

3. What Inspires Artists?