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EXPRESSIVE ARTS AND DESIGN
Expressive arts and design is made up of 2 key areas: creating with materials, and being imaginative and expressive.
Creating with Materials
Nursery is where we start exploring our creative areas. The children have a range of materials ready to use including mark making tools, tapes, glue, scissors, paint and collage. As the year progresses, we teach a range of skills including purposeful junk modelling, scissor skills and painting skills to ensure our children are budding artists and architects as they move into reception. We also talk through with the children the process of how they made their creation and how to adapt it in order to make it better.
In Nursery, we start our 'Drawing the Write Way' program (where children are taught the importance of early drawing and observation skills, in a program that supports the development of their fine motor control and handwriting).
In Reception, we have a 'Marvellous Creations' area where the children have a wider range of materials on hand including all off the above plus hole punchers, treasury tags, paper fasteners and elastic bands. We have a wide range of card and continual free access to ready mixed paint as well as powder paint. We build upon the skills taught in Nursery, by teaching the children how to add texture to their paint and pictures; how to design their creations and adapt them to improve them; a range of painting and printing techniques; how to use collage to create images; and how to design and make using a range of material for a purpose including the use of clay amongst other things (outlined on our EYFS long term plan). All of the skills taught are then built on as they move into KS1.
Being Imaginative and Expressive
Stories are an important part of our Nursery day. The children are immersed within our current story to help them understand it and in turn recount them. As they move into Reception, we use these solid foundations of story as the building blocks of becoming authors and creating our own stories, you will find the story books we have created this year within our reading area.
There is a daily rhyme time in Nursery and we also sing a range of other songs throughout our day and as part of our daily routine and environment.
Our Reception environment always has a number rhyme to interact with, songs are sang as a key part of our routines and to aid our learning too. Amongst other things, our songs help us to learn what day of the week it is, the names of the months of the year, they also help us get ready for our 'Love of Reading' time and we also sing to tell our friends we are proud of them when they are rewarded with a certificate.
We perform songs for audiences during our nativities and class assemblies, and for other classes during the year.
Drawing the Write Way
We have a weekly Drawing the Write way session in both nursery and reception. This is when a teacher demonstrates how we use our observational skills when we are drawing. We look closely at a range of objects and drawings and try to create these using our observational and drawing skills. The adult models how we can draw the object, talking through the process as they draw. The children then have a go themselves at drawing the object using the techniques shown.
Creating in the architect area (designing, building, adapting). Can you make a home for the penguins?
Creating in the 'Marvellous Creations' area. Can you use paper folding techniques to make a paper snake?
Designing in the small world area. Can you design and create a vegetable patch?
Creating in the construction area (designing, building, adapting). Making a tractor to collect all our vegetables.
Music
Music is integrated through our creative curriculum. We start in Nursery by perfecting our listening and tuning in skills. We then look at how we can create music using our own body. We then begin to listen to and copy sounds and rhythms exploring beat. These skills are then used to put instruments to our nursery rhymes in songs.
In Reception, we begin to listen to the music of others, we respond to music using our bodies and a range of movements, we also look at how we can respond to music using props and mark-making tools. We make our own musical instruments in Reception based on common instruments that we use. Singing also forms an important part of our day in Nursery and Reception.
An example of the instruments we have made this year so far...
POEMS AND RHYME
Rhyme and poems are taught throughout our EYFS department.
Nursery children have a daily rhyme time focused on their rhyme of the week. These rhymes are then performed at the end of the week and shared and celebrated on Class Dojo.
In Reception, the children regularly perform poems and rhymes. Again, these are shared and celebrated on our Class Dojo page.
(Please visit our Class Dojo page to see these performances if you are a current Nursery or Reception parent)
In our Assemblies this year , so far the Reception children have performed ....
* Autumn is Here
* I'm a Little Pumpkin
* Hooray it's New Year!
* One Potato, Two Potato...
* Vegetables Song
So far, the Nursery children have performed on Class Dojo the following rhymes...
*Humpty Dumpty
*The Grand Old Duke of York
* Hickory, Dickory Dock
*Hey, Diddle Diddle
* Baa, Baa, Black Sheep
* Round and Round the Garden
*Pat a Cake
*Down at the Station
*1, 2, 3, 4, 5
*Row, Row, Row your boat
*Incy, Wincy Spider
Every year, the Nursery children perform a Christmas sing-a-long for their parents. This is when the children perform well known songs, rhymes and dances dressed up as differing Christmas characters.
Reception also perform a yearly nativity. The children sing and act their way through the chosen nativity, and there is also normally a dance or two!
