Expressive arts and design involves enabling children to explore and play with a wide range of media and materials, as well as providing opportunities and encouragement for sharing their thoughts, ideas and feelings through a variety of activities in art, music, movement, dance, role-play, and design and technology.

Helping children to be creative is as much about encouraging attitudes of curiosity and questioning as about skills or techniques. Children notice everything and closely observe the most ordinary things that adults often take for granted. Building on children’s interests can lead to them creating amazing inventions or making marks on paper that represent for them an experience or something they have seen. Encouraging children to choose and use materials and resources in an open-ended way helps them to make choices and to have confidence in their own ideas. Retaining childhood confidence in their ideas and skills can easily be lost if others ‘take over’ and try to suggest what the child is making, thinking or doing. Just expressing an interest in the process a child has gone through is often enough or asking open questions such as ‘Can you tell me about it – that looks interesting’ may be all that is required to help a child hold on to their remarkable creativity.

Exploring and Using Media and Materials

This is about how children experiment with media and materials finding out about their properties and modifying and manipulating them. It includes exploring sounds, patterns, movement and different tools and techniques.

At Boundstone we use a huge variety of different media and materials both inside and out to encourage children to develop their creative skills, including chalks, charcoal, felt tip pens, coloured pencils and wax crayons, ready mixed and pwder paint, coloured sand, clay and collage materials. In fact if you can think of something that children can mark make or be creative with, we probably have it here!

Being Imaginative

This is about children’s explorations into the world of pretence, building on their experiences of the real world and transforming them into something new – whether through role play, music, pretend play, block play or small world play or a range of other areas. 

We have indoor and outdoor areas for music and storytelling and lots of opportunities for dress up and role play, including a new storytelling area in the garden which we've created with the help of a team of students from Chichester University.

We also encourage children to share their personal narratives - stories about their own lives in their own words. 

Annual Exhibition of Creativity

For the last two years, our SENCO, Kate Wollaston has organised a fantastic exhibiton of the children's creative work in The Atrium which parents and family members are invited to attend. Every child who attends the Centre, across Daycare, Nursery School and our Children and Family Centre groups is supported to produce a piece of work for this event, using whatever materials and inspiration they choose.

You can see some of this year's exhibits in the gallery below.