School Programs

Available for all exhibitions. Suitable for F–10, tailored to year level.

In this facilitated tour, students engage with artworks up close, exploring themes, visual conventions, and cultural and social contexts through in-depth discussion and inquiry. Experienced Heide educators guide students through our exhibitions, drawing connections between art, place and ideas.

Younger students learn to describe why and how people experience and respond to visual art, and explore how artists use materials and processes to make it. Older students move into analysing and evaluating how artists use techniques, ideas and materials that are shaped by the cultures, times and places they worked in, to communicate and challenge meaning (Victorian Curriculum F–10 (Version 2.0) Visual Arts achievement standards).

Combines an Exhibition Tour and an Art Workshop. Suitable for F–10, tailored to year level.

Devised with Heide’s exhibition curators, our Create Art Workshops give students a hands-on encounter with an aspect of each major exhibition artist’s creative practice. Workshops change with each exhibition, so students explore ideas and techniques drawn directly from the art on show. Combined with a facilitated Exhibition Tour, students move from looking and discussing to making, developing their own creative response in a real studio context.

This workshop builds students’ knowledge and skills in using visual conventions, visual arts processes and materials (Victorian Curriculum F–10 (Version 2.0) Visual Arts curriculum).

Suitable for F–10, tailored to year level.

Discover how Heide became the birthplace of Melbourne modernism. Students trace the history of this fifteen-acre property, from its significance as a Wurundjeri gathering place, to the home John and Sunday Reed opened in 1934 to a circle of artists, writers and intellectuals including Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker, Joy Hester and Mirka Mora.

Tours move from Heide Cottage, where it all began, to Heide Modern, the ‘gallery to be lived in’ commissioned by the Reeds in 1963 and now a celebrated example of Australian modernist architecture, where exhibiting artists engage in dialogue with the building’s bold vision.

This tour builds students’ understanding of the diverse roles, innovations, traditions, histories and cultures of artists, and how their work connects to culture, place and time (Victorian Curriculum F–10 (Version 2.0) Visual Arts curriculum).

Combines an Exhibition Tour and an Art Workshop. Suitable for F–10, tailored to year level.

Inspired by Mirka Mora’s vibrant mural on the Heide Cottage windows, students bring their own metamorphic creature to life, drawing on the whimsical characters of fairy tales, folk art and vivid daydreams that populate Mirka’s enchanting universe.

For younger students (F–6), collaging their metamorphic creature or painting onto calico builds their skill in exploring and combining visual conventions, materials and processes to create artworks that communicate their own ideas (Victorian Curriculum F–10 (Version 2.0) Visual Arts curriculum, Foundation to Level 6).

For older students (7–10), sculpting their creature in calico as a three-dimensional soft sculpture, or  combining painting and needlework, builds their skill in manipulating materials, techniques and visual conventions with increasing control to represent and communicate ideas (Victorian Curriculum F–10 (Version 2.0) Visual Arts curriculum, Levels 7–10).

Suitable for F–10, tailored to year level.

Heide has one of the largest collections of outdoor sculpture in Australia, including major works by Anthony Caro, Simryn Gill, Anish Kapoor and Inge King. In this facilitated tour, students investigate shape, form, texture and scale, and consider the diverse materials and techniques artists use.

This tour is built around a specific curriculum thread: understanding how visual conventions, processes and materials combine in a finished work. Younger students explore how these elements come together in three-dimensional artworks; older students move into analysing exactly how and why artists manipulate them. (Victorian Curriculum F–10 (Version 2.0) Visual Arts achievement standards for Levels 5 to 10)

Combines an Exhibition Tour and an Art Workshop. Suitable for F–10, tailored to year level.

This problem-solving workshop invites students to explore the expressive potential of shape, form, space, colour, texture and light in relation to the surrounding environment, as they create their own three-dimensional maquette for Heide’s sculpture park.

By designing and making their own maquette, students learn to use materials and processes with growing control to represent and communicate their own ideas in three dimensions (Victorian Curriculum F–10 (Version 2.0) Visual Arts curriculum).