Trainer Gulnaz’s workshops

Early Childhood Education and Care Trainer Gulnaz led her students through an engaging art workshop designed to help them guide children in their future roles. A key focus of the workshop was understanding the meaning behind artworks. Trainer Gulnaz thoughtfully connected art, literature, and music to transfer meaningful messages related to events such as Harmony Week.

We invite you to learn more about the activities shared by Trainer Gulnaz:

“This class learning experience focused on belonging, kindness, and celebrating diversity. The students pretended to be preschoolers and explored all activities through their eyes, creating a meaningful and playful learning journey.

We began by reading Who We Are, which helped children think about themselves and others. We also reflected on The Rainbow Fish, where the fish learns that sharing brings happiness and friendship. This inspired our message of kindness and working together.

Children explored colour and creativity by making rainbow flowers using hand towel paper and water paints, rolling paper to create rainbows, and joining rainbow strips together to show how many pieces can become one beautiful whole.

The student practised scissor cutting to create flower shapes in different colours and attached them to paddle pop sticks to make a flower bouquet. This showed a beautiful message — one flower is special on its own, but together they become even more beautiful, showing love, joy, and kindness.

Boomerang art was created using recycled cardboard and dot painting, inspired by The Rainbow Fish. Children also explored nature by making a smiling cardboard pot with twigs and sticks from the garden, adding crunched crepe-paper flowers to each stem.

A flag activity supported cultural learning, where children created flags from different countries and used handprints with matching colours to represent greetings in our welcome song. The Aboriginal flag was included with the greeting “Warami,” showing respect and connection to Country.

Children used shapes like triangles, squares, and rectangles to build houses, learning that even though shapes are different, they can come together to create something strong and meaningful, just like people in a community.

A large tree was created using sponge painting with butterfly impressions, and an emotions collage explored feelings such as happy, sad, angry, and excited, helping children understand and express emotions.

We sang We Are Australian and shared greetings like “Namaste.” We also connected our learning to important celebrations such as Harmony Day, Eid, Hindu New Year, and Navruz. These celebrations all share the same message: kindness, respect, hope, and togetherness, even though they are celebrated in different ways.

Through all experiences, children learned that while we may look different and come from many cultures, our hearts are the same; we all share love, happiness, and kindness.”