Explore the Flourish Art Week Activities!
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If you are thinking about taking part in the AccessArt Art Week 2025, you can find the recommended activities below.
These have been chosen around the theme of Flourish – helping us all celebrate growth.
Take your time to choose activities which will appeal to your pupils and teachers. Try to resist overfilling the week, but do ensure you are familiar with the preliminary drawing and making activities as you can use these to extend experiences within the week.
Happy browsing!
Flourish: Making Sketchbooks
It’s a great idea to make sketchbooks specifically for the art week, so that all sketchbook content can be gathered together in one place. These books then make a great record of the whole week, which can be displayed and then given to the pupils to be taken home.
Think about having the whole school making sketchbooks on day one of your art week as a morning or afternoon activity. The energy of the session will set the art week off to a great pace and it’s nice when everyone can do the same activity.
Even better, if you request pupils collect and save recycled cardboard and paper the weeks prior to art week, they can then help contribute the materials they need to make their sketchbooks at very little cost.
Choose one or both sketchbook-making activities from the ones below.
Flourish: Preliminary Exploring Drawing
Throughout the week, use drawing exercises to create energy, develop skills, open minds and enliven projects.
It’s important to realise that the drawing exercises you choose to do can stand alone. They don’t have to line up closely with the main projects you choose (although of course, they can).
By interspersing the days with drawing activities in sketchbooks, you will help vary energy levels and keep children engaged. Think carefully about why you are choosing a particular exercise: is it to develop skills, introduce new materials, calm children, or boost their energy levels. Most exercises can be adapted to suit all ages.
The drawing exercises below have been chosen because they can be adapted particularly well to suit the theme of Flourish – please see the guidance under each image below. Choose from the following activities, and try to include one drawing activity a day during the art week.
Continuous Line drawing
finding marks made by artists
Flora & Dauna: Source Material & Conversation prompts
mark-making and sound: part three
EXPLORE THE BRUSHWORK OF VAN GOGH & CEZANNE
Flourish: Preliminary Exploring Through Making Activities
In addition to drawing exercises, we can use short making activities to help open minds and provide opportunities for pupils to develop skills in manipulating materials.
Like the drawing exercises, these activities don’t have to be linked to a particular project. Check the suggested adaptations below to help you incorporate some of these activities into your art week.
Flourish: Main Projects
The following projects explore drawing and making and can be used across different age groups. All projects will be enriched by the skills and experiences practised through the exercises above.
Choose projects that you think will appeal to teachers and pupils! There is no right or wrong choice. Allow for a relaxed, exploratory pace – making full use of a collapsed timetable to enable the pupils to explore different materials and more space than perhaps your usual timetabled lessons allow. Be prepared for creative chaos and energy, tidying throughout the week when you need to bring the energy back to a more focussed approach.
Don’t forget to build time into your projects for talking, reflection and even photography and documentation if you have tablets which the pupils can use.
We recommend one or two projects per class for a full art week, depending on your pupils, timetable and projects chosen. You can always extend a project by doing more of the drawing and making exercises above.
NEVER-ENDING LANDSCAPES
Birds in Trees
sculptural environments inspired by hockney
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