Melbourne Festival Children’s Workshops

Each year, the Melbourne Festival arranges workshops for children in local schools and with local young people, funded by sponsorship from local companies. The Arts Melbourne team feels that if children and young people are encouraged to take part in the arts at a young age, they will develop a lifelong love of the Creative and Performing Arts.

And each year the theme of the workshops links to the Melbourne Festival theme.

Pop Up Poppies Melbourne—our BIG community project in 2018—inspired children at Melbourne Infant School to create full-size papier-mache ponies and dogs and decorate them with purple poppies to remember the animals killed in WWI. The Melbourne Junior School children made full-size silhouettes of Soldiers and poppy field backdrops to commemorate the Soldiers who died in WWI.

Wildlife Sculptor Lynn Hazel Smith led a Wind in the Willows themed workshops working with the Children to create woodland creatures from clay and worked with Peter Woods of Greenwood Days to create a willow rowing boat which was exhibited at Melbourne Festival and is now installed in the Schools’ wildlife garden. At Melbourne Junior School Victoria Brown led a workshop with year 6 to create 6 large canvasses inspired by images from The Wind in the Willows.

In 2017 Arts Melbourne undertook a big project about Melbourne’s Market Gardening Heritage – For the Love of Lettuce with support from the Heritage Lottery Fund. Young artists at The Athenaeum Youth Club created 5 A1 panels illustrating the farming year. The children at both schools grew plants and produce throughout the summer in their gardens and Artists led workshops. Jane Bevan worked with the children to make vegetable sprites and Victoria Brown worked with them to create Vegetable Scrolls. Year 5 at Melbourne Junior School had a VERY MESSY DAY making Mosaics to decorate a wall by the Melbourne Food Forest at Melbourne School’s. Everyone had a great day making a metre pumpkin, huge apples, giant sweetcorn and pea pods with peas the size of cabbages.

Alice in Wonderland took Melbourne Through the Looking Glass in 2014! Year Six at Melbourne Junior School and EVERYONE at Melbourne Infant School took part in a Fantasy Landscapes workshop – inspired by C S Lewis’s Alice in Wonderland led by artist Laura Donaldson and a Mad Hatters Workshop with local milliner Joanne Rost. All of the hats were made from recycled materials and the results were AMAZING!

Another popular project was the Melbourne Sari – created as part of Expanding Horizons, an Arts Council funded collaboration between Melbourne Festival, Surtal Arts and the South Asian community in Derby. After talking to Gopa Nath about Sari designs the children decided what they felt typified Melbourne – mainly ducks it appears – and worked with artists Jemma Rix to create illustrations and prints to combine into a design for a full size sari to tell everyone about Melbourne.

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