CCEB students get artistic

The Cairns Regional Art Gallery

What do you do if the next topic in the coursebook is ‘Art’? You take your students to an art gallery! Upper-Intermediate Class teacher Sissa and Intermediate Class teacher Justyna both came to the same conclusion and decided to take their students to the Cairns Regional Art Gallery.

Prior to the visit, however the students had to learn a lot of vocabulary used for describing works of art. They also had a task to do while at the gallery, which was to take 10 photos of the paintings, sculptures, drawings that caught their eye to use later in their Pecha Kucha weekly presentations.

Our guide Teho pointed to some more interesting works of art and told us stories about the animals presented in the drawings.
The image of a kangaroo drawn by one of the first European settlers. We can only imagine their surprise when they spotted their first kangaroo! 😉

Many interesting exhibitions were on at the time the CCEB students visited the gallery. One of them, called Animalia Australis, included the 19th century Australian art which many students found particularly interesting as it displayed drawings of some more popular Australian animals. On the right is the drawing of a kangaroo from circa 1745 by Sydney Parkinson, a Scottish artist who embarked on a discovery voyage in the Southern Hemisphere.

Other interesting animal drawings are presented below:

Flying foxes (fruit bats)
Echidna
Tasmanian tiger (most likely extinct)

Another interesting exhibition the students enjoyed was called Erub Erwer Meta and it displayed the works of the Torres Strait Islander people. Our guide from the Torres Straits told us a lot about the meaning of the works of art on display. Everyone loved the chairs in the photo below:

The Torres Strait Islander culture is strongly connected with water and fishing, so as you can imagine the images of fish, fishnets and vivid blue colour of the ocean appear in many of their works.

Teacher Justyna loved the painting of the fish.
The same fish pattern was used in making these ceramic plates.

Check out the video below to see how the students of both classes described the works of art:

The visit was really successful and the students got inspired by what they had seen as they created their own ‘works of art’ while playing Jail Break game 😉

Can you see this is Australia? The sculpture also includes Tassie! 😉
One of the students had to draw a politician. Can you guess which one he drew?

They also collected enough footage for their follow-up presentations which will be presented as separate blog posts.

 

 

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About CCEB

We are teachers and students at the Cairns College of English and Business (CCEB). How lucky are we to work and study in the Australian Wet Tropics with the world's oldest rainforest and the Great Barrier Reef at our doorstep! We would like to share our happy posts with the world! Welcome to the CCEB space eveyone.

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