Arts Festival 2024

Positive Mental Health and Wellbeing Arts Festival 2024 

This year our arts theme has focused on encouraging our children to understand the importance of positive mental health and wellbeing. This theme is particularly important to us as a recognised Nurture UK school. 

The children have explored our arts theme via a variety of arts projects and opportunities. Reception classes, Y1, Y2, Y5 and Y6 have created visual art outcomes including colourful self-portraits, exploring colours via the Zones of Regulation (YR), creating collagraphs to print emoji faces (Y1), expressionist inspired self-portraits (Y5) and large collaborative artworks inspired by the art movement orphism (Y6). 

In other year groups, children have explored emotions and feelings through music and poetry (Y2, Y3 and Y4), producing and performing stunning original musical compositions, creating graphic scores and wonderful poetry. 

In addition to this, the children have also listened to many stories this term promoting positive mental health and wellbeing, specifically chosen by our DC coordinator. 

Over the year, the children have also enjoyed other arts activities related to our arts theme. Most recently YR to Y5 were invited to watch an immersive show called Emoto-Matic. This show highlighted the importance of expressing feelings and emotions rather than bottling them up. 

Poetry and performance company ‘Word Up’ also visited our school. KS2 children were invited to an interactive assembly promoting self-expression through poetry and rap, which was very inspiring. 

Arts ambassadors, Creative Club, Art Nurture Club and the Art Mentors have also produced work over the course of the year connected to our arts theme. They have created striking posters promoting positive mental health, learnt about significant people in history that have succeeded despite mental health issues, crafted ‘Worry Dolls’ from South America, performed songs from Billy Elliot and experienced drama activities with Miss Garrioch. These clubs have also had a part in creating props and posters for the Y6 production of Honk (the story of the Ugly Duckling).  

This year finished with Y6’s fantastic performance of Honk. The musical Honk explores issues related to self-esteem and confidence, as well as being a well-loved traditional tale. Miss Garrioch, Y6 staff and of course the children worked tirelessly to produce this fantastic show, which delivers a powerful message. 

We hope that the children have enjoyed learning about and producing creative work based on this important theme.

Worry Dolls from South America  

As part of our Mental Health and Wellbeing arts theme, Creative Club, Art Nurture Club and the art mentors have been learning about and creating “Worry Dolls” from South America. 

Indigenous people of South America traditionally make beautiful “worry dolls”, constructed of wire, wool and colourful textile leftovers, the dolls are dressed in traditional Mayan styles. 

Worry dolls are given to anxious or worried children. The idea is that children can tell their doll about their sorrows, fears and anxieties, and then hide it under their pillow before going to sleep at night. It is said that the child passes on its worries to the doll during the night and, by the next morning, all the sorrows are said to have been taken by the doll. 

We also read Ruby’s Worry by Tom Percival to support the children’s understanding of sharing and discussing worries and anxieties. 

Reception - Portraiture and the Zones of Regulation 

Throughout the year, children in Reception have learnt about The Zones of Regulation and recognising and responding to their emotions and the emotions of others.  This learning was reinforced during their Arts Week Project. 

The children learnt about portraiture and looked at famous portraits. They learnt about the proportions of the face and created pencil sketches of their own faces. Using mirrors, the children then explored how their own faces look when they experience different emotions.   Finally, they combined all these skills and learning to create mixed media self portraits depicting a range of emotions through colour and through their drawing. 

Year 1 Emoji Icon Collagraphs

Year 1 have enjoyed discovering the art of collagraphy (a form of printing).They learnt how to make their own collagraphs from found materials and then went on design, make and print their own emoji faces. Designing and printing the emoji collagraphs enable the children to develop their understanding of facial expressions, feelings and emotions, whilst looking at the colours associated with the Zones of Regulation.

Year 2 Poetry, Music and Graphic Scores.

Year 2 have enjoyed exploring their emotions through expressive arts. They have listened to a wide range of music from ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’ by Wagner to ‘Happy’ by Pharrell Williams and discussed how this music can reflect and at times change our moods.  

They have composed their own pieces of music to express different emotions, deriving the themes for these from the Zones of Regulation. They have worked in teams to create a piece with a beginning, middle and end and have described how they used classroom instruments to represent different aspects of a variety of emotions. They then expressed these visually using graphic scores with pictorial and graphic representations. 

Year 2 explored poetry as a ‘picture with words’. They learned about a range of imagery to express feelings and compared these to the Zones of Regulation colours and emotions. They wrote free verse poems to describe different emotions and learned to use metaphors and similes to express these through the art of poetry.  

Year 3 Music, Composition, Poetry and Graphic Scores.

Taking the four Zones of Regulation as a starting point to determine mood and from this, tempo and dynamics, we created a four-movement composition. We linked each movement to the four elements in nature: earth, fire, wind and water, using these as a stimulus to organise sound motifs for each movement.  

Click on the link to hear the beautiful music crafted by the Y3 children. 

Year 4 Poetry and Performance 

Y4 have created poems based on feelings and emotions. The children acted out scenarios in small groups to express different emotions, before using a thesaurus to find synonyms for each feeling. Once they had a range of vocabulary, they wrote and performed their poems. 

Please clink on the link below to hear some of our Y4 children read their poetry aloud. 

Year 5 Expressionism 

As part of our Mental Health and Wellbeing arts theme, Y5 have been studying Expressionism. This project taught the children about the Expressionist art movement and the 'Father of Expressionism', Edvard Munch. Y5 explored different ways to portray feelings and emotions in art to create imaginative self-portraits. The children investigated how colour can be used to express emotions and moods.  

Year 6 Abstract Art – Orphism 

As part of our Mental Health and Wellbeing arts theme, Y6 have been learning about “Orphism”. This project taught the children about the concepts of abstraction and distortion. They studied the visual characteristics of abstraction and created a musically-inspired collaborative abstract painting. Orphism uses bright colors and simple shapes such as circles, triangles and squares. Orphism was an abstract, cubist influenced painting style developed by Robert and Sonia Delaunay in the early 1900’s. The Delaunay’s wanted their art to express feelings of joy, movement, and music. Can you guess what type of music and feeling goes with each artwork? 

Creative Club 

Members worked on a variety of exciting creative projects connected to our arts theme, mental health and wellbeing this year. They created these large self-portraits that represent how a positive affirmation can affect our self-esteem and well-being. 

Arts Ambassadors 

The Arts Ambassadors have been researching significant artists, scientists, activists, sports people and anthropologists who have excelled in their chosen field, despite living with mental health conditions. m 

Did you know Charles Darwin, Freddie Flintoff and Serena Williams experienced anxiety and Florence Nightingale lived with PTSD? The children have been creating posters to show that you can't always tell what a person is going through, and that mental health conditions can and do impact people from all walks of life. Mental health disorders do not have to hold anyone back from achieving their dreams. 

The Arts Ambassadors collaborated with Y6 to make props, posters and artworks for the musical Honk (based on the story of the Ugly Duckling). The arts ambassadors enjoyed creating an oversized fabric lily pad, paper lilies and giant eggs. They also created these wonderful flying ducks and magnificent Honk posters to advertise the Y6 performance.