Arts Council for Wales - Ysgol Acrefair, Wrexham

Re-imagining the Curriculum at Ysgol Acrefair

We have worked on projects with the Arts Council for Wales regularly since 2016. This has been a huge privilege!

The Ysgol Acrefair Curriculum nurtures and develop the creativity of learners so that they achieve their potential, grow as well rounded individuals and are prepared with skills for life. They help to make sure that in a rapidly changing world, children and young people in Wales are able to meet the needs of the economy and to thrive within the increasingly competitive environment of day-to-day life.

The Arts Council of Wales also believe that creativity is essential to the success and fulfilment of young people; that it is the basis of lifelong learning, and that this begins in our schools.

Through a series of grants awarded to the school by the Arts Council of Wales, we have been able to work closely with Creative Agents and Practitioners who enable us to achieve this vision.

Watch how learning is brought to life in Ysgol Acrefair:

Our teachers work very hard to deliver a curriculum which is engaging and motivating for the children that we teach.

We hope to provide children with opportunities which help them to develop skills across the curriculum and the skills that they need to understand the world around them.

Our Core Values are:

Inspire * Aspire * Nurture * Respect

These are reflected in the way that we approach teaching and learning and in the skills that we aim for our children to develop

Past Projects

We have participated in a series of different projects where the focus has been on literacy, outdoor learning, numeracy, humanities and more. Usually our projects have enabled the children to make links between a range of different subject areas, as we do within our normal curriculum. You can see some of our projects outlined in the slides below.

One particularly special project linked to our local area but was so successful that we were invited to the Tate London so share the children’s wonderful work.

The aim of our project was to help children to develop skills in literacy, through their engagement with the arts.

We wanted to provide the children with opportunities to develop their spoken and written language in a meaningful and exciting way.

We chose the local area as a focus for our work and our teachers worked closely with Ben and Ed to explore the ways in which we could help the children to develop their literacy skills whilst also learning about this theme.

Whilst all of the adults had lots of good ideas, the children in Year 3 have played a huge role in ‘leading the learning’ throughout the project and the great success that we have seen has been a credit to their interest and engagement!

During the project the children have explored the local area, investigated the history of clay and brickworks and dug up their own clay which they have worked with during the art sessions. They have reflected upon what the area was like in the past and what it will become in the future- samples of all of the work that the children have created will be buried in a time-capsule during our celebration afternoon so that people in the future can find out more about what the local area is like now! Throughout our work in art and music we have explored the ways that we can language to describe and explain what we have found out.

We hope that you enjoy sharing in the success of this project with us!

The Tate London

We were privileged to be invited by The Arts Council to showcase our work at the Tate gallery in London. We worked with Ben and Ed to create a new rap based on our journey down to London, and made clay sculptures.

Cynefin- Celebrating Diversity in Wales