Art at CEDARS is both exciting and challenging. Set within a stimulating, yet relaxed atmosphere, where students are encouraged to develop their own personal cultural, spiritual and moral experiences.
Art & Design Key Stage 3
At Key Stage 3, the students can experience a wide variety of techniques and processes to enhance their knowledge and skills through a wide range of projects. The students can access processes such as printing, drawing, painting, modelling and ceramics through the work of varied artists and art movements. Student can experience Museum and Gallery visits and there are opportunities to work with visiting artists, to enrich the curriculum.
By basing our projects on established artists, creating topics on natural elements or more figurative art they will experience a broad breadth of work and skills. As each project progresses, the students will be encouraged to develop their own ideas, creating highly individual pieces of work.
All of their time within the art room is designed to ensure they are ready for any accredited course they may take in Key Stage 4, whilst also developing the skills of patience, dexterity, self – reliance and problem solving.
Art & Design Key Stage 4
At Key Stage 4, the Art curriculum is designed to support the AQA GCSE and educate students that there are many varied jobs and careers open to them within the Arts and creative sector, once they leave education. This course can be tailored to suit the individual needs of the student and allows them to be entered for either the GCSE.
When students join us in Key Stage 4, they follow a syllabus created to encourage independent learning and so is, by design, less structured. Students will work within the same stimulating yet relaxed atmosphere they did in KS3 and retain the structure of all students being given the same topic as a starting point; they are actively encouraged to use all the previous skills they have experienced and refine and develop their understanding of the technical and creative skills, processes and media, independently.
In KS4 they are allowed and encouraged to follow their own strengths and interests whilst developing their own ideas in areas of art which stimulate them. This way of working is designed to help them in their GCSE exam which is worth 40% of the overall mark and will be taken in Year 11. Here, the students will be given a choice of 7 questions with deliberately ambiguous titles. From this starting point, they must use their knowledge and skill set to develop and refine their own ideas, culminating in a final piece created within the 10 hour exam.
Like KS3, the curriculum is enhanced with gallery visits and bringing in outside agencies to improve their knowledge and skills. In Year 11, the GCSE group is taken to London for the entire day. This visit is usually prior to the exam and is designed to stimulate their ideas, while broadening their cultural, moral and spiritual experiences, as well as giving them a very different viewpoint of modern Britain than which they are familiar with.