Students at St Monica’s Primary School in Kangaroo Flat were proud to show their families the fruits of their hard work over the course of their integrated inquiry lessons at a “Celebration of the Arts” gala event to launch the students’ art exhibition, complete with the fanfare of a recital from the school’s instrumental students. 

Integrated inquiry includes geography, history and a creative execution of learnings, which were included in the school’s art exhibition.  

A striking display at the exhibition was a 3D Streetscape of Bendigo, which included ingenious cardboard models of Sacred Heart Cathedral and St Kilian’s Church.  Principal, Fiona Dearn, said the students went on excursion to the Bendigo CBD and were charged with the task of creating a 3D streetscape during a ‘’Building Bendigo Day” to reinforce their learnings in history and geography while doing so.

Art teacher, Adrienne Stokes said she was proud of the effort her students had invested in their artwork and pleased to see they were proud to display their work at the exhibition.  Adrienne says her favourite works at the exhibition are those which evolved from the study of renowned Australian modernist Margaret Preston.  “Students studied Margaret Preston’s woodblock prints. They were given a brief to create an image of flowers which needed to be high contrast and lined with a thick black outline to represent the woodblock edge,” said Adrienne. 

Principal Fiona Dearn said it would be very difficult to choose works to enter Catholic Education Sandhurst’s MacKillop Art Awards, as there were so many works of high merit on display and the number of entries a school can make is obviously limited. 

October 2022