Indigenous Perspectives

Aboriginal Cave Paintings, Cobar, NSW

Large Poster of Indigenous Cave Art

1. What students could learn from this resource (VELS/AusVELslevel & learning focus statement).

Learning focus statements from VELS:

Level 2 – Humanities

They begin to grasp the role and importance of various cultural groups that make up the Australian community, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.

They begin to understand how local resources are used to make products which meet local people’s needs and the needs of people in other places.

2. How and why the resource would be used in the classroom for HSE learning (Prep – Year 2).

In a grade 2 class this poster would be used as a visual aid when studying a unit on Indigenous Art. Students would have looked at dot paintings the previous week and leaning about the different symbols in the paintings. In this lesson students would be learning about how in Indigenous people used the natural resources in Australian land to make the different colours in the paintings. This lesson students will be making their own cave painting, using  a paper bag, scrunched up to look more like a rock. Students would be able to paint anything they like relating to what we would have learnt in class. As a class I would review the different symbols of Indigenous Australians. 

3. A brief description of how your resource/activity responds to an aspect or aspects of the readings for that week.

It is important that all students learn about Indigenous Australian and that ‘all students understand and acknowledge the value of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures’ (Price, 2008 p. 365).  Teaching students about Indigenous Australian art and how they used natural land resources to paint, students can gain an understanding of the history of Indigenous Australians and the importance of the land to them. The poster used as a resource shows students how this historic art looked and how important it is that it is looked after.