Year 5 Visual Arts – Term 1 (WA Curriculum): Creating Art with Purpose and Meaning

What this unit covers

In Term 1, Year 5 Visual Arts in the WA Curriculum centres on the unit “Creating Art with Purpose and Meaning”.

Students explore personal beliefs and opinions through art making, create meaningful artworks, and develop skills in presenting work to audiences while seeking constructive feedback.

Lesson sequence (8 lessons)

The unit breaks down into the following lesson-by-lesson sequence — each title below is a teachable lesson, in order:

1. Exploring Art That Tells Stories About Beliefs
2. Creating Self-Portrait Artworks That Show Who We Are
3. Making Art About Things We Care About
4. Designing Artworks to Share Our Opinions
5. Preparing Our Artworks for Display and Presentation
6. Presenting Our Art to Different Audiences
7. Giving and Receiving Feedback About Our Artworks
8. Improving Our Art Based on Audience Response

Curriculum codes in this unit

Content codes:

Reading the codes: WA codes (the ones starting with WA) pack the year level, learning area, strand and content number into one string, while the national Australian Curriculum v9 uses a different anatomy that starts with AC9 — same content family, different labels. Our complete WA Curriculum guide decodes both, character by character.

Planning notes for Term 1

WA terms run roughly 9–11 weeks, and in 2026 Term 1 runs from Monday 2 February to Thursday 2 April — 9 weeks for WA public schools. With 8 lessons in this unit, that leaves breathing room for assessment, moderation and the weeks that disappear to carnivals, camps and public holidays — plan the assessable work to land two to three weeks before the end of term rather than in the final week.