Art and Design

“Art and design is a central feature of life and learning at Bealings!” Peter Dixon

 

Art gives us tools for learning across the curriculum and ways of experiencing – emotionally, spiritually, intellectually – interpreting, responding, creating, inventing and communicating throughout our lives!

We are continually increasing our capacity to create and appreciate art and design.

At Bealings, we concentrate in depth on the domains of 

drawing, painting, sculpture, ceramics, collage, printmaking, textiles

although they will also have experience of lens-based media, installation and site-specific work, digital and new media in KS2.

The children acquire the concepts, skills, practical and disciplinary knowledge associated with each domain, appropriate to their stage of development.

The learning is deeply inter-connected with other domains and subjects, through the powerful contexts of our work in the fictional organisations. For examples see our “Learning Journeys” on this website!

“Seeing comes before words.The child looks and recognises before she can speak…it is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world.” 

John Berger, Ways of Seeing, 1972

From the Early Years class when children pick up a mark-making tool and draw with abandon, to Year 6, as more sophisticated and discerning artists, Art is an essential part of our ability to create understandings and, as the Durham Commission noted in 2019:

“the capacity to imagine, conceive, express or make something that wasn’t there before” !

Ben Shahn : “There is no kind of experience which has not it’s potential visual dimension, or it’s latent meanings for literary or other expression.”

Art and Design Progression Map