Embedding Literacy and Numeracy in Claude Monet (SA, SACE Board-Aligned)

Art teachers in South Australia know the literacy and numeracy general capabilities are not a bolt-on. Under the Australian Curriculum, they run through every learning area, and the SACE Board expects the habits students build in Years 7–10 to carry into Stage 1 and Stage 2 Visual Arts. A unit on Claude Monet is a surprisingly rich vehicle for both. This piece shows how to make Monet a place where students read, write and reason with numbers, without diluting the art.

Why Monet suits the literacy and numeracy capabilities

Monet gives students a shared visual text they can describe, analyse and argue about. That is the heart of the literacy capability: comprehending and composing. It also opens the door to numeracy, because Impressionism was partly a study of light changing over measurable time. When students work through Claude Monet – Impressionism and the Painting of Light, they are not just looking at pretty gardens; they are decoding how a painter recorded the same haystack at different hours. In South Australian classrooms that dual focus lets you tick genuine curriculum boxes while keeping the art front and centre.

Building the literacy capability

Start with structured talk before writing. Give students a word bank of tier-three vocabulary such as broken colour, en plein air, palette, atmosphere and optical mixing, then have them narrate a Monet aloud to a partner using at least four terms. Move to extended writing with a clear scaffold so every student can compose an analytical paragraph.

• Model a paragraph using the point-evidence-explanation structure your English faculty already uses, so literacy expectations are consistent across the school.
• Provide sentence stems: "Monet creates a sense of ... by ...", "The effect on the viewer is ...".
• Ask students to annotate a printed image, labelling colour, light and brushwork before they write a word.
• Close with a peer edit focused on precise verbs and subject-specific nouns.

These same reading and writing moves transfer directly to expressive painters, so a follow-up study using Vincent van Gogh – Colour and Expression lets students reuse the vocabulary and compare how two artists handle emotion and colour. A useful extension is a short glossary task in which students write their own student-friendly definition for each term and pair it with a thumbnail sketch, which cements both the word and the concept.

Building the numeracy capability

Numeracy in art should feel authentic, not forced. Monet's series paintings invite real measurement and proportion work.

1. Have students calculate the ratio of warm to cool colours in a Monet detail and express it as a fraction and a percentage.
2. Use a light-timing task: if Monet painted a scene across a two-hour window in twenty-minute sittings, how many canvases, and what fraction of the daylight did each capture?
3. Explore the golden section and grid placement of the horizon, measuring in centimetres and converting to a scaled sketch.
4. Cost a small plein-air kit in AUD, for example $18 for paints, $12 for brushes and $9 for paper, and ask students to budget for a class set.

When students then explore mixing systematically through Colour Theory – From Itten to Practical Application, the numeracy becomes visible again as they measure parts of pigment and predict outcomes.

Assessment and reporting in the SA context

Keep evidence simple and defensible. A short annotated visual analysis covers the literacy capability; a colour-ratio worksheet covers numeracy. Both map cleanly onto the Australian Curriculum achievement standards you report against, and they build the analytical writing stamina that the SACE Board rewards in senior folios and written responses. Where it fits naturally, you might connect Impressionism's attention to local light and place to how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists across South Australia record Country and seasonal change, treated with care and accuracy rather than as decoration.

Related reading from the Teacher Hub

• Embedding Literacy and Numeracy in The Argumentative Essay (SA, SACE Board-Aligned)
• Embedding Literacy and Numeracy in Pink Floyd: The Dark Side of the Moon (SA, SACE Board-Aligned)
• Using Digital Tools to Teach Percentages and Interest (SA, SACE Board-Aligned)