Creative Arts & Climate Action
“I just take my pencil for a walk and see what it makes.”
Our art gallery is at the heart of our school, because this is where we proudly display the masterpieces created by our artists from Nursery to Year Six. Our dedicated art studio, complete with adjacent woodland outdoor classroom, is the engine room where creativity is nurtured and flourishes! We focus on developing the children’s skills and experience in painting, printing, drawing, collage, textiles, sculpture and working with wood. The children learn about one of these strands each half term and then we display and track how their skills progress in this area as they travel through the school. They get to explore and use a range of high quality resources and explore and emulate the work of artists, giving them an idea of the breadth of artistic possibility.
A child from each class is chosen as an ‘Arts Ambassador’ for the year and attends Art meetings to discuss and organise everything involving art at Appledore School. The children have the opportunity to gain Arts Award from the Arts Council, a ‘Discover’ award in Key Stage One and an ‘Explore’ award in Key Stage Two. The children can work on their awards during ‘Art Club’ after school. We enjoy relationships with local art organisation and artists our children’s art work is displayed in the Burton Art Gallery’s annual schools exhibition and entered in other local and national competitions. We were awarded Artsmark Gold by Arts Council England.
‘All children are Artists. The problem is how to remain an Artist once they grow up.’ Pablo Picasso.
We couldn’t agree more, so we give creative arts a very high priority in the hope that our children’s love of all things arty continues when they leave us.
Music is very important to us and to reflect that we employ a specialist music teacher. At Appledore School we give the children opportunities to learn to play musical instruments as part of the school curriculum. This gives the children access to a range of instruments, including steel pans, drums, violins and ukele and involves learning the basic technique. At the end of the unit of work they perform to each other and to parents. If children they want to take the instrument further or learn a different instrument, we support the children and families with finding teachers.
We love to sing and during the Autumn Term, all classes contribute to a Harvest Festival, be it performing in our school hall or at St Mary’s Church. At Christmas, children in the FSU and Key Stage 1 perform a Christmas play to the school and parents and Key Stage 2 act a Christmas Play at Stg Mary’s Church. We also have weekly whole school singing sessions where we sing a range of contemporary songs. Pupils in Key Stage 2 have the opportunity of joining the School Choir. The Choir performs each term either at events at school or at St Mary’s Church. They learn and sing a range of musical genres which, over recent years, has included Gilbert and Sullivan; Sea Shanties; songs from popular movies and Jazz to name but a few.
Our music development plan is available here.
Caring for our environment is very important to us and we are so lucky to have such a wonderful site and to be located in such a beautiful part of North Devon. Our school site includes a field, orchard, polytunnel, WWII dig for victory garden and a woodland that includes a pond, outdoor classroom, firepit, dedicated Early Years learning area and so much flora and fauna that we love to learn about and look after. All classes experience outdoor learning from qualified forest school teachers and have the opportunity to be an Eco Ranger and the possibility of being a class Eco Ambassador. Our curriculum is rich with outdoor, environmental and climate awareness learning opportunities, either in school, our local environment or further afield. Our school Climate Action Plan is available here.
