‘To nurture talent and achievement in everyone and build the foundations for success in the 21st Century’
Holmesdale Community Infant School recognises the importance and value of Design Technology (DT) in the curriculum. We believe that DT should be a stimulating, enjoyable and inclusive experience for all children throughout the school. We believe that children should leave our school with the willingness to take creative risks in order to produce their own ideas through design and develop the ability to evaluate and improve upon what they have made. We, therefore, encourage the children at Holmesdale to develop resilience in DT by making and learning from mistakes.
All children should leave Holmesdale with a set of basic skills in designing, making and evaluating their own designs. Children will be given opportunities throughout the school to use a selection of tools and techniques.
Expressive arts and design is one of the seven areas of the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) and is used to develop a child's imagination, creativity and their ability to use media and materials. Children do this in range of ways including singing songs and making music, dancing, playing with colours, textures and design. All these approaches to expressive arts help children to represent and understand their own feelings and ideas.
Children in the EYFS start to learn to construct with a purpose, using a variety of resources and using simple tools and techniques competently and appropriately in order to shape, assemble and join materials together. Children in the Early Years will be encouraged to experiment to create different textures, build models with a range of objects and begin to record their experiences through drawing, writing or by jotting down comments a child has made.
In KS1 the skills learnt in EYFS are further developed. DT is specifically planned for each half term throughout each term in Years 1 and 2 and there is a progression of skills going from each year group. These lessons are cross-curricular and form part of the learning for the topic of that half term, for instance making Tudor Houses in Year 2 in the Spring term. Children at Holmesdale are given the opportunity to design on paper and then later to evaluate their designs and models after they have been made. These evaluations are recorded on paper and form part of the teacher’s assessment in this area. Planning for DT at Holmesdale is taken from the National Curriculum’s framework and objectives.