Expressive Arts and Design 

When providing opportunities for the children to enjoy Expressive Arts and Design, the staff carefully plan learning experiences that link across the different areas of learning. This enables the children to make connections by responding and reacting to what they see. Through exploring different genres of dance, music, story telling, and the visual and digital arts, the children are encouraged to express their own feelings and point of view. 

At Chalkwell, we aim to give children an invitation to play through creating exciting areas to explore both inside the classroom and in our garden. We encourage the children to play with purpose and work on ideas together. When playing and working alongside one another, the children build their ability to persevere, experiment, collaborate and develop their critical thinking. When creating or playing, the children are encouraged to invent and adapt their designs and talk about their discoveries. 

We enjoy visits from artists, crafts people and musicians to inspire the children. The children observe and learn from seeing these skills in action and then apply them to their own play and creative activities. Through using different tools and techniques, the children can experiment with their own design ideas and explore different colours, textures and materials. We encourage the children to explain the process they have used and build on their ideas alongside one another.  

Expressive and creative play enables the children at Chalkwell to practise and refine their thoughts, both real and imagined. We also promote this through imaginative role play experiences as this helps the children to make connections with their own lives. The children enjoy capturing their learning through their own drawings, photographs and collages. At Chalkwell, we definitely ‘Enjoy’ being creative.