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Important update from TheSchoolRun

For the past 13 years, TheSchoolRun has been run by a small team of mums working from home, dedicated to providing quality educational resources to primary school parents. Unfortunately, rising supplier costs and falling revenue have made it impossible for us to continue operating, and we’ve had to make the difficult decision to close. The good news: We’ve arranged for another educational provider to take over many of our resources. These will be hosted on a new portal, where the content will be updated and expanded to support your child’s learning.

What this means for subscribers:

  • Your subscription is still active, and for now, you can keep using the website as normal — just log in with your usual details to access all our articles and resources*.
  • In a few months, all resources will move to the new portal. You’ll continue to have access there until your subscription ends. We’ll send you full details nearer the time.
  • As a thank you for your support, we’ll also be sending you 16 primary school eBooks (worth £108.84) to download and keep.

A few changes to be aware of:

  • The Learning Journey weekly email has ended, but your child’s plan will still be updated on your dashboard each Monday. Just log in to see the recommended worksheets.
  • The 11+ weekly emails have now ended. We sent you all the remaining emails in the series at the end of March — please check your inbox (and spam folder) if you haven’t seen them. You can also follow the full programme here: 11+ Learning Journey.

If you have any questions, please contact us at [email protected]. Thank you for being part of our journey it’s been a privilege to support your family’s learning.

*If you need to reset your password, it will still work as usual. Please check your spam folder if the reset email doesn’t appear in your inbox.

National curriculum art – what they learn

Boy and girl covered in paint
Help to spark your child's artistic streak with these useful tips.

National curriculum art is a vital part of your child's education and involves exploring the properties of materials and their textures, experimenting with different effects, and having the freedom to create. Creativity is an important part of the national curriculum, as it encourages children to work independently.

What’s taught in class?

A pre-school class might bring in a range of materials from home - fabric and wool scraps, scrunched up foil, bubble wrap, cardboard and sandpaper. They might create a ‘texture wall' – a smooth-rough, soft-hard, glittery-dull patchwork collage of recycled materials. For the rest of the term the children stroke, touch, poke, and even press their cheeks against the wall to explore the different textures.

Through this activity the children learn about the properties of the different materials, how to manipulate them, and the use of colour and space. They also learn to work in a team and by talking about what they see, feel and like they extend their vocabulary and learn more about each other.

As the children's knowledge and understanding develops in the coming years, they will build on this, becoming much more critical and discerning in their ideas and choices.

Their making in art, design and craft will become more complex and well thought out.

For example, at a later Key Stage a teacher may teach the class about colours by asking the children to design packaging suitable for a healthy snack.

They will have learnt that certain colours are associated with particular tastes or qualities (pink and red, for example, indicate sweetness; white and blue suggest purity) and they will need to appeal to their target audience in their design.

Exploring times and worlds

A less obvious benefit of art learning is that it takes children to other worlds, cultures and times. Children explore ideas and meanings in the work of artists, craftspeople and designers and they learn about the diverse roles and functions of art, craft and design.

Children learn more about how people lived in the past by looking at their art and artists. The Egyptians, for example, surrounded themselves with colourful buildings painted with scenes of everyday life and their gods. The paintings were meant to be realistic: in the tombs they represented the life which the deceased had led.

So there’s a lot more to art than just having fun with paint!