The development of children’s artistic and cultural awareness supports their imagination and creativity. It is important that children have regular opportunities to engage with the arts, enabling them to explore and play with a wide range of media and materials. The quality and variety of what children see, hear and participate in is crucial for developing their understanding, self-expression, vocabulary and ability to communicate through the arts. The frequency, repetition and depth of their experiences are fundamental to their progress in interpreting and appreciating what they hear, respond to and observe.

ELG: Creating with Materials

• Safely use and explore a variety of materials, tools and techniques, experimenting with colour, design, texture, form and function.
• Share their creations, explaining the process they have used.
• Make use of props and materials when role playing characters in narratives and stories. 

ELG: Being Imaginative and Expressive

• Invent, adapt and recount narratives and stories with peers and their teacher.
• Sing a range of well-known nursery rhymes and songs.
• Perform songs, rhymes, poems and stories with others, and (when appropriate) try to move in time with music.

Nursery 3-4 Years Old

• Learning about artists through stories.
• Discussing what we can see in paintings and the colours that are used.
• Play listening games with children. What can we hear?
• Singing songs and listening to different types of music.
• Playing with musical instruments and making our own noise makers.
• Moving and dancing to different kinds of music.
• Acting out the stories we hear, using puppets and small-world props.

Reception 4-5 Years Old

• Recreating sculptures and paintings we learn about using a variety of media.
• Using music to act out familiar stories.
• Learning and performing dances from different cultures.
• Visiting different places in the area to role play, such as the shops, and the library.
• Role-playing familiar characters in stories and real life.

Birth to Three Years Old - babies, toddlers and young children will be learning to:

• Show attention to sounds and music.
• Respond emotionally and physically to music when it changes.
• Move and dance to music. Anticipate phrases and actions in rhymes and songs, like ‘Peepo’.
• Explore their voices and enjoy making sounds.
• Join in with songs and rhymes, making some sounds.
• Make rhythmical and repetitive sounds.
• Explore a range of soundmakers and instruments and play them in different ways.
• Notice patterns with strong contrasts and be attracted by patterns resembling the human face.
• Start to make marks intentionally.
• Explore paint, using fingers and other parts of their bodies as well as brushes and other tools.
• Express ideas and feelings through making marks, and sometimes give a meaning to the marks they make.
• Enjoy and take part in action songs, such as ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star’.
• Start to develop pretend play, pretending that one object represents another. For example, a child holds a wooden block to her ear and pretends it’s a phone.
• Explore different materials, using all their senses to investigate them. Manipulate and play with different materials.
• Use their imagination as they consider what they can do with different materials.
• Make simple models which express their ideas.

3 and 4-year-olds will be learning to:

• Take part in simple pretend play, using an object to represent something else even though they are not similar.
• Begin to develop complex stories using small world equipment like animal sets, dolls and dolls houses, etc.
• Make imaginative and complex ‘small worlds’ with blocks and construction kits, such as a city with different buildings and a park.
• Explore different materials freely, to develop their ideas about how to use them and what to make.
• Develop their own ideas and then decide which materials to use to express them.
• Join different materials and explore different textures.
• Create closed shapes with continuous lines and begin to use these shapes to represent objects.
• Draw with increasing complexity and detail, such as representing a face with a circle and including details.
• Use drawing to represent ideas like movement or loud noises.
• Show different emotions in their drawings and paintings, like happiness, sadness, fear, etc.
• Explore colour and colour mixing.
• Show different emotions in their drawings – happiness, sadness, fear, etc.
• Listen with increased attention to sounds.
• Respond to what they have heard, expressing their thoughts and feelings.
• Remember and sing entire songs.
• Sing the pitch of a tone sung by another person (‘pitch match’).
• Sing the melodic shape (moving melody, such as up and down, down and up) of familiar songs.
• Create their own songs or improvise a song around one they know.
• Play instruments with increasing control to express their feelings and ideas.

Children in reception will be learning to:

• Explore, use and refine a variety of artistic effects to express their ideas and feelings.
• Return to and build on their previous learning, refining ideas and developing their ability to represent them.
• Create collaboratively, sharing ideas, resources and skills.
• Listen attentively, move to and talk about music, expressing their feelings and responses.
• Watch and talk about dance and performance art, expressing their feelings and responses.
• Sing in a group or on their own, increasingly matching the pitch and following the melody.
• Develop storylines in their pretend play.
• Explore and engage in music making and dance, performing solo or in groups.