Expressive Arts and Design

The development of children’s artistic and cultural awareness supports their imagination and creativity. It is important that children have regular opportunities to engage with the arts, enabling them to explore and play with a wide range of media and materials. The quality and variety of what children see, hear and participate in is crucial for developing their understanding, self-expression, vocabulary and ability to communicate through the arts. The frequency, repetition and depth of their experiences are fundamental to their progress in interpreting and appreciating what they hear, respond to and observe.

3 and 4-year-olds will be learning to:

• Explore different materials freely, to develop their ideas about how to use them and what to make.
• Develop their own ideas and then decide which materials to use to express them.
• Join different materials and explore different textures.
• Create closed shapes with continuous lines and begin to use these shapes to represent objects.
• Draw with increasing complexity and detail, such as representing a face with a circle and including details.
• Use drawing to represent ideas like movement or loud noises.
• Explore colour and colour mixing.
• Show different emotions in their drawings – happiness, sadness, fear, etc.

Children in reception will be learning to: 

• Explore, use and refine a variety of artistic effects to express their ideas and feelings.
• Return to and build on their previous learning, refining ideas and developing their ability to represent them.
• Create collaboratively, sharing ideas, resources and skills. 
• Develop storylines in their pretend play.

Early Learning Goals:

Creating with Materials Children at the expected level of development will:

- Safely use and explore a variety of materials, tools and techniques, experimenting with colour, design, texture, form and function;

- Share their creations, explaining the process they have used;

- Make use of props and materials when role playing characters in narratives and stories.

Being Imaginative and Expressive Children at the expected level of development will:

- Invent, adapt and recount narratives and stories with peers and their teacher;

- Sing a range of well-known nursery rhymes and songs;

- Perform songs, rhymes, poems and stories with others, and – when appropriate – try to move in time with music.