This Term
Summer 1 - Artists and Designers
Welcome back! We hope you had a lovely holiday spending time with your families. We are excited to be in our Summer term now, and our topic this half term is going to be ‘Artists and Designers”! We can’t wait to see all your super creative ideas.
The purpose of this unit is for children to explore, appreciate, and be inspired by a range of artists and designers, including local artists and designers such as Watson Fothergill and Paul Smith. They will be able to make observations on different pieces of artwork and designs, sharing their opinions with others. They will develop their own artistic skills, learn to use a range of tools and materials to create, and explore colour, texture, design, form and function.
This unit will enable children to develop a range of artistic skills and techniques which they can apply throughout their art and design technology learning in school.
Our three big questions for this unit of learning are:
- What different textures can you find in clothes?
- Can you share your opinion about a piece of artwork or a design?
- Can you create a piece of artwork or a design like ____?
- What skills does an artist or designer need?
As part of our learning this half term, we will be having a art workshop day! We will be immersing ourselves in different kinds of art, and creating pieces of art, on our own and collaboratively. We already know that the Reception children are going to have so many wonderful ideas!
As always, we will engage with quality texts and visual material to support our learning around our topic. Here are the stories we will be focusing on this half term.
Story Snuggle Time:
Developing a love of reading at an early age will support your child's listening and attention skills, vocabulary development and understanding of the world around them. Your child will be bringing home a book from our 'library' for you to share together at home. This could include talking about what you can see in the pictures, other books that have similar characters, or what you and your child liked or didn't like about the story. We also hold Stay and Read every Friday from 8:45-9am, please join us for this, if you are able, to share in stories with your child.
Drawing Club:
Drawing Club is a special club that promotes confidence in mark making, imagination and writing skills. We use our focus books (as shown above on the page) to teach elements of writing.
The structure drawing club follows is:
Moment 1: Vocabulary Development
Moment 2: Listening to the story
Moment 3: Modelled drawing
Moment 4: Drawing Club. This aspect may be linked to the main character in the book, the setting or adventure time.
If you would like some more information about drawing club, or would like to see your child's work, just ask a member of staff.
PE:
PE will happen every Thursday. Please come to school wearing your sports leggings or trousers - there is no need for the children to get changed at school. We kindly ask you to support your child with taking off and putting on their socks and shoes. The more they practise this at home, the more independent they will become in PE lessons.
Forest School:
Forest School happens every Monday. We attend Forest School with Mrs Walker, who has worked at Victoria Primary School for a long time! She is excited to help the children explore our wonderful forest school space, to further develop their outdoor learning skills. Our children learn the importance of looking after our environment, alongside lots of knowledge about the world around them. A reminder to send in a pair of wellies to be kept at school.
Phonics and Reading:
We follow the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds scheme at Victoria Primary School. All children will bring a reading book home with them. This will begin as a wordless book, which is used to encourage language development first, and then move onto books with simple words and phrases in for the children to decode on their own. Please speak to staff if you have any questions or would like any support with phonics.