This section of my portfolio presents the work that I have completed during my final placement for children aged four to five. One of the main goals that I set for myself was to increase my knowledge about the Aboriginal people and cultures; luckily, the

Reconciliation week was close, and I decided to start my reconciliation journey to develop my understanding of Australia’s first people and share it in different forms of Arts learning experiences with the children.

My intention in my learning experiences was to implement Aboriginal culture and perspectives through different forms of Arts and simultaneously introduce new aspects of being artistic to children and to other educators. 

As Staines and Scarlet (2018) emphasise we do not teach children the Aboriginal culture, we teach them through the culture, I tried to implement  my plans through Aboriginal perspective in various different ways which I believe it is more appropriate, respectful and meaningful. I tried to blow the spirit of Aboriginal culture into different artistic learning experiences; what is presented here is just part of a learning sequence influenced by the Aboriginal culture. The rationale behind this sequence of learning plans was the findings of a research study by Ahlskog-Björkman and Björklund (2016) that demonstrates thematic interest-based learning experiences which start from Arts would increase children's engagement and development. To design my learning plans, I have used The Early Years Learning Framework to assist me to plan for developing a whole child. In addition to The EYLF, I found The Eight Aboriginal Ways of Learning  by Yunkapotra (2009) very useful as it brings more insight into different ways of engaging children (Churchill et al. 2019). Also, I focused on the mathematical opportunities for children as well because Arts can foster children's mathematical skills. In each part of my Arts Portfolio, you will find:

​-A Plan

-A Reflection

-Materials

-Resources

I have done my placement in an exceeding rated preschool. However, I found out that there are massive, missed opportunities that children can engage with different forms of Arts to increase their understanding of themselves and the world around them. Children were eager to dance but there were limited opportunities for them to listen to music and touch musical instruments which result in poor spatial awareness and hand-eye coordination. I found out that the generation called digital natives do not have regular and purposeful access to ICT to learn the appropriate literacy for the 21st century while the setting was equipped with the best quality resources and materials.

Finally, as I mentioned HERE I strongly advocate arts education as a crucial part of existing as a healthy, creative and problem-solver human being

and as one of the most practical ways of including ALL humans in kindergartens,

schools and society.