Walungurru Primary School and members of the community worked in collaboration with our team to create a fantastic week of art and learning!

The program had a central focus on the connection between art and the zones of emotional regulation, with the main task revolving around creating four art pieces using car bonnets.

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Car bonnets

Members of the community, students, and our three volunteer artists: Tim Rossiter, Nikki Carabetta and Sheila Smith, joined forces to create four incredible art pieces that explored a spectrum of emotions. On the first two days, the car bonnets were prepped, the colours were mixed, and the ideas were developed. From there, the team began painting!

The car bonnets were painted green for pukulpa (happiness), blue for sadness (watjipa), red for anger (pika) and yellow for excitement (yunypa).  

We look forward to seeing the colourful bonnets around the school!

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Art boards

The goal of this activity was to help students further develop their emotional regulation skills. Emotional regulation is a critical skill that many people struggle with, especially children and adolescents.

The session started off with a brainstorming session where the group discussed and acted out how a person may react when they are feeling a certain emotion or stressor. Students then put their learnings into action by getting creative with the art boards. They expressed how they were feeling in that given moment, painting smiley faces, snakes, suns and storms.

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Paper-mache Kangaroo

Nikki was assigned the daunting task of creating a school paper-mache Kangaroo. Despite a few challenges along the way, she was able to whip up an incredible one-meter-high sculpture with the help from students and a mix of flour and water.

The Kangaroo is expected be used later in the year, in the annual spearing competition, at the school athletics carnival.

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‍Classroom activities

When students weren’t outside painting, they were either keeping up to date with their regular class programming or singing and dancing with Matt Jolly and Fiona Scicluna. The acoustic guitar made a regular appearance to accompany sing-a-longs, with lots of giggling along with the lyrics.

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Student Excursions

During the week, Walungurru Primary School successfully piloted three on-Country excursions with the assistance of the Red Dust team. The excursions were held at Desert Bore and Tinki outstations and will expand to other locations in the coming months.  

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With your support we can create more opportunities and experiences for young people.