Art & Design
Art and Design at Kingsley
At Kingsley CP, we want every child to see themselves as an artist. Our Art and Design curriculum gives children the knowledge, skills and confidence to experiment, invent, create and think critically, while developing their own ideas and artistic style.
We believe great art is about much more than producing a finished picture. Children learn about the process of being an artist: exploring, experimenting, making choices, refining ideas and reflecting on what they have created.
Developing Our Artistic Skills
Our curriculum is carefully sequenced from Reception to Year 6 so that children's artistic knowledge and skills build year upon year.
We focus on four key areas of Art and Design:
Drawing • Painting • Sculpture • Printing
Within these, children explore the fundamental artistic elements of form, colour, pattern, value, tone, shape, texture, line and space.
As children progress through school, they revisit these elements with increasing sophistication and independence. For example, in drawing, children progress from exploring simple lines and shapes to using perspective, proportion, texture, value, graded pencils and charcoal, eventually developing their own artistic style. Children also experience an increasingly rich range of materials and techniques, including pencil, ink, charcoal, watercolour, acrylics, clay, papier-mâché, Modroc and mixed media.
Our Five-Step Art Process
Every art unit at Kingsley follows our consistent five-step art process:
Cold Task – children create an initial piece independently, showing us what they already know and can do.
Research – we explore the work of great artists, craftspeople, architects and designers and develop our artistic vocabulary.
Experimentation – children explore materials and techniques, discovering what works and making their own creative choices.
Development of Ideas – children refine their knowledge and skills and develop their ideas in preparation for their final piece.
Final Piece & Evaluation – children bring everything they have learned together to create a final piece before reflecting on and evaluating their work.
This means children can see just how far they have come from their first attempt to their final creation. Their artistic journey is captured in their individual sketchbooks, which become a record of exploration, experimentation, progress and creativity.
Inspired by Artists
Throughout their time at Kingsley, children encounter a wide range of artists and artistic traditions, both contemporary and from history. These are deliberately connected to the skills children are developing. Our curriculum includes artists such as Vincent van Gogh, Georgia O'Keeffe, Claude Monet and Andy Warhol, alongside contemporary and less familiar artists and illustrators. Children don't simply copy their work; they investigate their techniques and ideas and use these as inspiration for their own artistic choices and creations.
Making Meaningful Connections
Where meaningful, our art also connects with children's learning elsewhere in the curriculum. A sculpture might connect to the Stone Age or Romans, an observational drawing to science, or an artwork to a high-quality text being explored in English.
These connections give children's artwork context and purpose while ensuring that the development of artistic knowledge and skill remains at the heart of the lesson.
Every Child an Artist
We want children to be brave enough to experiment, confident enough to make their own creative decisions and reflective enough to recognise how their work can develop. By the time children leave Kingsley, we want them to have much more than a collection of finished pieces. We want them to have discovered that art has no single right answer – that their ideas have value, their creativity has a voice, and they have the skills and confidence to bring that creativity to life.
