It is an important part of Academy life that children are able to achieve at a high standard within the arts regardless of their wider academic skills. Our curriculum includes a range of activities in all areas of the arts including dance, drama, music as well as art and design. Children are able to develop their personal social and emotional development within the arts as the Academy encourage them to participate in and respond to the creative and cultural life of their communities and different cultures. Through the arts children are able to express their thoughts and emotions and empathise with others. We offer many opportunities for the children to compete and celebrate their artistic learning through festivals and competitions over the year within and beyond the Academy.
We are lucky enough to have a purpose built music and creative arts space at Sawtry Junior Academy which enables pupils to develop creatively with high quality resources and space to express themselves.
In 2019 we achieved the Artsmark Silver award for the quality of our teaching in Arts.
Art
Our Art curriculum is designed to engage, inspire and challenge our children. We teach the appropriate knowledge and skills to experiment, invent and create using a full range of artisit media. They are provided with opportunities to gain an understanding of art and design and reflect on how it shapes our history and contributes to culture, creativity and wealth of the nation.
All children have thier own sketchbook which captures and celebrates their development, progression and growing skills as artists.
Design Technology (D.T.)
The aim of our D.T. curriculum is to bring Design Technology alive for our children, to evoke the children’s curiosity and engage their minds to create, build and use technology to build new and inventive products. We have mapped our D.T. learning to have cross curricular links to add purpose and intrigue to the children’s experiences.
Our dedicated space for food technology ensures all children develop basic cooking skills and an understnading of healthy eating. Progressive units of work also ensure they develop skills in textiles, joining, mechanisms and structures.
Music
Music plays an important part in the life of our school. As part of themed learning, children have the opportunity to listen, compose and perform, in an engaging, exciting and innovative way. Through listening, children learn to appreciate many different styles of music from other cultures and times. In composition work, the children learn to improvise, choose and control a range of sounds, blend and layer musical ideas and become more aware of musical elements such as rhythm, pitch, tempo and form. For performance, and especially with singing, the children progress from developing accuracy of melody, rhythm and diction to increasing control of breathing, articulation and awareness of phrasing. Together with this, all children are taught music notation in conjunction with recital skills.
As well as a creative and progeressive curriculum which includes development of performance for all throughout Key Stage 2 through two staged productions, weekly music lessons for all are part of our curriculum. This includes an opportunity for all pupils to learn to play the recorder, clarinet and tuned percussion instruments.
We are very proud of choir (further information on the clubs page). In the past 12 months they have performed at the Sawtry Carnival, the Summer Fayre, accompanied Wyton brass band at their Christmas concert and been to the O2 to perform in the Young Voices concert.
We are also able to offer a wide range of peripatetic music lessons. Some of these are 1:1 whilst others can be taught in small groups, which reduces the cost to parents. We are currently able to offer drums, woodwind, guitar, piano, violin and recorder. Further information about these lessons and the teachers can be obtained form the Academy office
How the Arts fits into our Curriculum and how skills are developed within this can be seen in the Curriculum overviews.
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