Our Curriculum - Art Program

Art education at Birralee Primary School involves the study of an expressive, creative and communicative form of the Arts. The art program aims to provide students with an engaging and creative visual arts program.

The first dimension of the program focuses on Creating and Making. It involves students being engaged in concepts, exploring experiences, ideas, feelings and understandings through making, interpreting, creating and presenting art work. Students perform activities that allow them to be exposed to elements, principles, materials and various types of equipment. Students investigate different creative outcomes as ways to express themselves.

The second dimension of the program focuses on Exploring and Responding. It involves students analysing and developing understanding about their own and other people’s work. Students also have the opportunity to be exposed to various artists of the past and present day. During art classes, students learn about specific artists, their techniques and about the history of art. Children are exposed to famous artists and study their style, composition and technical features of their works. These studies are often the motivation to inspire artwork produced by the students.

The focus for lessons is specific with a linked outcome that is achievable for all students. Student's artwork is highly valued and is frequently presented throughout the school on display. Art genre incorporated into the program includes units of work covering collage, drawing, painting, print-making, sculpture, textiles, construction and mixed media.

Art plays a pivotal role socially, economically and culturally. Art encourages the development of skills and the exploration of technologies, forms and processes through single and multimodal forms. It fuels the exploration of ideas that cross many human emotions and moods through holistic learning using cognitive, emotional, sensory, aesthetic, kinaesthetic and physical fields.

Art allows students to create and critically explore visual culture and works that involve both traditional and contemporary forms. The Birralee art program recognises the multicultural world filled with imagery that students inhabit. Art is essential to our wellbeing because we create much of our world in order to enhance our experiences and understandings of the diverse perspectives that constitute our cultural heritage.

Learning, through Art, allows students to communicate their perceptions, observations and understanding of structures, functions and concepts drawn from other areas of the curriculum. Art is a vehicle for exploring and reflecting upon new ideas.

Art learning expects student conduct in the exploring and expressing of ideas, visual art practices, presenting and performing of artworks, and responding and interpreting of art works.

According to the Victorian Curriculum, there are four strands that the visual art curriculum focuses on:

Explore and Express Ideas, where students are given opportunities to explore visual arts practices as inspiration to create art from different times and cultures, ideas, experiences, observations and imagination to create visual artworks.

Visual Arts Practices, where students are given opportunities to select and apply visual conventions, materials, techniques, technologies and processes specific to different art forms when making artworks.

Present and Perform artworks, where students are given opportunities to create and display art work considering how ideas can be expressed to an audience in different way to enhance their meaning.

Respond and Interpret art works, where students are given opportunities to identify and describe how ideas are expressed in artworks by comparing art from different contemporary, historical and cultural contexts.At Birralee, learning in art classes is sequential and students have a continuous experience. Art lessons are mapped according to the Victorian Curriculum document. They are planned in units with scaffolded activities across all grade levels where skills are built upon in a differentiated manner.

The focus for lessons is specific with a linked outcome that is achievable for all students. Student's artwork is highly valued and is frequently presented throughout the school and put on display.

At all levels, learning in art provides opportunities for students to experience a range of traditional, contemporary (including digital) and new media/multidisciplinary forms and genres. Art genre incorporated into the program includes units of work covering collage, drawing, painting, print-making, sculpture, textiles, construction and mixed media.

Students partake in art for a 50 minute lesson per week in the art room setting.

Focus: Involves artist focus, works of art, art history, literacy based, skill based, technique based, goal setting, learning intentions identified for each lesson, including tutorials and explanations.

Activity: Students create an art work over 3-4 consecutive, scaffolding lessons. This will depend on the unit of work and focus. Students apply what they have learned, focused on, have been given a tutorial on, demonstration on, or experimented with.

Reflection/Share time: Discussions involving student feedback, reflection, assessment and visual art diary entries.

Carmela Licastro
Art Teacher