A comprehensive arts education provides a rich and engaging curriculum that develops pupils’ abilities to think, reason and understand the world and its cultures. It offers pupils opportunities to respond, perform, and create in the arts. The arts in still in our pupils the habits of mind that last a lifetime: analytical skills, the ability to solve problems, perseverance and a drive for excellence. The creative skills children develop through the arts carry them toward new ideas, new experiences and new challenges, as well as offering personal satisfaction. This is the intrinsic value of our Arts Programme .We believe the arts give expression to our understanding, our imagination and our creativity. As the world we inhabit becomes smaller, faster and more competitive, these qualities are increasingly important. The arts are an integral part of a complete, successful and high-quality education. Study of the arts enhances young people’s intellectual, personal and social development.
The Six Strands Of The Curriculum Are:
- Drawing which allows for creation, expression, clarifying thought and communication;
- Paint and colour which provides for an appreciation and understanding of colour leading to expression of experience, interest and imaginative ideas as well as an awareness of colour in their own work and crafted and designed objects;
- Print which encourages a focus on inventive and functional graphic processes;
- Work with Clay gives opportunities to form and change a material imaginatively and to design and make objects;
- Construction activities provide opportunities to explore the media of 3-D, balance and an understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of particular structures; and
- Fabric and Fibre which encourages the child to explore some of the design processes in craft and to appraise various craft materials. While the development of ideas through imagery provides a balance to other subject areas in the curriculum, the visual arts curriculum must provide challenge and motivation. The six strands of the visual arts curriculum include the two strand units: making art and responding to art.