Uruguay Primer Grado Art Education

The Uruguayan Primer Grado (1st Grade) Art Education curriculum falls under the "Creativo-Artístico" area of the "Programa de Educación Básica Integrada," specifically within "Tramo 1" (levels 3, 4, and 5 years old). This curriculum emphasizes developing artistic competencies through exploration, creation, and communication using various artistic disciplines.

Focus and Goals

The curriculum focuses on developing the following specific competencies:

• Sensoperceptive Competency: Students relate to their environment through perceptive skills, recognizing and differentiating aspects of the world around them. This involves sensory perception, the interplay between internal and external worlds, and visual thinking.
• Interpretative Competency: Students uncover implicit messages in images through associations and relationships, fostering reflection and interpretation of meaning. This focuses on expression and communication.
• Productive-Creative Competency: Students demonstrate curiosity, play, experiment, and explore various techniques and procedures to build knowledge and express ideas, feelings, and sensitivities. This involves divergent thinking and developing aesthetic criteria.
• Cultural Competency: Students show curiosity about artistic productions from different artists and cultures, relating them to their own cultural environment. This includes cultural capital, interest, autonomy, participation, and cultural citizenship.
• Competency in the Use of Visual Language Elements: Students recognize visual language codes and play with basic artistic elements to communicate the underlying idea of an image and the artist's intended expression. This involves developing aesthetic criteria.
• Competency in Collective Visual Arts Practice: Students engage in projects that promote interaction, community dialogue, and connections between the individual and their locality. This includes communication, critical thinking, recognizing elements of visual language, diversity, and shared visual construction.

Content

The curriculum covers various content areas within the visual and plastic arts, including:

• Languages of Space: Sculpture (modeling, assembling), installation, and intervention. For Primer Grado, this involves experimenting with modeling and assembling using different materials.
• Languages of the Plane: Drawing, painting, collage, printing techniques, and photography (framing, planes). Primer Grado students explore graphisms, representations of the real world, color and texture explorations, and basic photography concepts.
• Audiovisual Language: Framing, recording, planes, camera movement, and narrative and simple montage.
• Genres: Human figure, landscape, portrait, and self-portrait. Primer Grado begins with recognizing the human figure in artistic productions.
• Plastic Elements: Color (primary and secondary colors, variations in hue and tone), point and line (materiality, forms), matter (textures), and light (natural and artificial light, light and shadow).
• Visual Culture: Artists and their works, design in toys and children's objects, images in mass media and urban spaces. Primer Grado students begin by identifying artists and their works in their region and designs in children's toys and objects.
• Appreciation, Reading, and Interpretation of Images: Description and evocation of images, comprehensive interpretation, and contextualization of images. Primer Grado focuses on describing and evoking images in a group setting.

Methodological Orientations

The curriculum emphasizes sensory experience, observation, research, and reflection. It promotes active learning through methodologies like collaborative learning, project-based learning, and experimentation. Evaluation is qualitative and process-oriented, focusing on the student's progress, interest in improvement, and changes observed in their productions. Portfolios are used to document the learning process.