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Classroom activities

Bring Education Week 2023 to your classroom with a huge range of classroom materials from leading cultural, sports and educational organisations

On this page:

Join in the Education Week celebrations by using these curriculum-aligned resources for fun and educational activities with your students.

More activities will be added to this page over the coming weeks.

Move: physical activity

  • A warm-up is an important part of preparing to move and dance safely and efficiently. Pop on these follow-along videos with your class or use them as inspiration to create your own warm-up.

  • Students are invited to join Wilay to learn a health and wellbeing dance to make them feel good!

    Wilay is a character from The Australian Ballet performance Wilaygu Ngayinybula//Possum's two minds choreographed by Ella Havelka. Wilay means possum in Wiradjuri language.

    There are 2 videos to choose from, one for juniors and an accessible version with additional options. Pick the one that suits and get your students dancing!

  • Games can break the ice, help to physicalise complex concepts, create a shared dance vocabulary and encourage students to create new movements in a fun way.

    The Australian Ballet website have examples of movement games that can be tailored to suit many different themes and are great starting points for generating movement that can later be used to choreograph a dance.

    These are designed as a foundation for teachers to build upon, depending on the age group, theme and learning outcomes required. Each video is supported by a PDF resource.

  • Get your students moving and develop dance knowledge with Ausdance Victoria - Activate!

    Activate is a series of easy-to-use flash cards that challenge kids with an energetic and fun brain break and can easily be incorporate into the school day.

  • Deepening student engagement with health and physical education curriculum, these units of work build on students’ understanding and application of movement skills.

Make: hands-on-learning

  • Making a trailer is a fun way for students to recommend their favourite books. ACMI’s Make a book trailer resource will take students through the process of creating their very own book trailer.

  • Make a Bush Clock with Ballarat Municipal Observatory and Museum and learn how to use the stars to find South and to estimate the passage of time when out in the bush. Move outside to observe the night sky and count the stars in the Southern Cross – Crux and contribute valuable data to the Globe at Night Project.

  • These Banyule-Nilumbik Tech School resources help teachers to construct a Cardboard Construction Techniques display board for your classroom. These demonstrate some excellent techniques students can use during cardboard prototyping.

    The display is best assembled by teaching staff or a school technician. Teachers will need access to a laser cutter to create the display.

  • Engage students with caring for marine and coastal environments with the Coastcare Victoria Schools Kit. It includes video clips with simple, easy to follow lesson plans, activities including quizzes, games, videos, and investigation worksheets.

  • This outdoor activity from Geography Teachers Association of Victoria can be performed on a day after it has stopped raining. Students will survey and observe a location in the school or possibly the entire school grounds and create a map to show what they have learnt.

  • This is a fieldwork activity from Geography Teachers Association of Victoria for students to undertake on school grounds. Students will conduct a tree survey of their school and create a map representing the characteristics of the various trees within the grounds.

  • Make a nature print mobile. Explore your garden or park to find sticks and leaves of different shapes and textures to create this Nature Print Mobile. Add colourful yarn and clay beads to complete. Video and activity sheets designed and presented by Heide Artist Educator, Fiona Cabassi.

  • Join NGV Educators in activities exploring line, colour, shape, tone, form and texture. Learn about how these art elements are used in artworks from the NGV Collection, then get creative with the art elements yourself.

  • Explore NGV activity sheets and games for kids available for free download. Print to use, screenshot on your device and mark-up digitally, or simply take the idea and use paper and pen.

  • The Nature’s Mascots program tells Parks Victoria’s conservation stories in an age-friendly way by using cute and cuddly or weird and wonderful heroes to represent our key ecosystems.

    Their mascot literacy resources help young learners to love where they live, develop connections between people and places, and understand how to care for both habitats and species.

  • The Park Explorers program encourages students to discover and care for their natural spaces through place-based inquiry learning.

  • The My Shadow Self workshop by Polyglot Theatre is an on-demand online workshop where Polyglot artists guide students through creating a shadow puppet of their fantasy selves. Play and performance merge as the students project their puppet around their space — a tiny shadow person exploring their world.

    • Year levels: Grades 1 to 6.
    • Duration: 20 minutes.
    • Location: online
    • Recommended materials: paper, pen or pencil, masking tape, scissors, wooden skewers or coat hanger wire, card or thick paper, torch or flashlight, and your student’s imagination
    • Access the workshop on VimeoExternal Link .

Motivate: student voice

  • AFL Leadership (In-class) modules

    These lessons, aligned to the personal and social capability curriculum, supports student to build their social awareness and management skills by exploring concepts around leadership. A project-based learning activity gives students the opportunity to build their student voice and agency.

  • If nature could speak, what would it say? Conservation storytelling provides a creative platform for Victoria’s animals and plants to tell the world how important their homes are and why humans should care about them. Telling stories can inform and inspire students to connect with and act for nature, allowing them to think about the environment from different perspectives.

  • A short course from VicSRC to help school-aged students understand how to use their voice at school to make change.

  • Check out resources made or supported by VicSRC to help you bring student voice, agency and partnership to your school.

  • Get your students excited about reading and writing with an interactive creative writing tutorial from 2023 Victorian Premiers’ Reading Challenge author George Ivanoff.

    • Year levels: Grades 3 to 6
    • Duration: Video is 12 minutes long but includes pauses for students to complete writing exercises
    • Location: online

    View transcript

Teacher professional development

  • Learning Beyond Four Walls is a professional development program for teachers on integrating outdoor learning across all subjects.

    Outdoors Victoria has developed 16 toolkits for teachers. The toolkits provide information about outdoor learning and it’s benefits and more than 180 activities across 13 subject areas.

    • Year levels: early childhood and primary school teachers.
    • Location: online
    • For more information and to access the program, refer to: Outdoor LearningExternal Link .

  • An online professional development course from Social Education Victoria, VicSRC and the Department of Education for teachers to explore how to work in partnership with students.

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Reviewed 12 May 2023

Education

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