How to Teach Frida Kahlo: A Step-by-Step Lesson Plan (SA, SACE Board-Aligned)

Frida Kahlo gives South Australian art teachers a rare gift: an artist whose work is visually striking, emotionally honest and dense with symbolism students can actually decode. This walkthrough turns that into a single, structured lesson for a Years 9–10 class, aligned to the Australian Curriculum as delivered in South Australia and building toward the analytical expectations of the SACE (Stage 1 & 2). You get objectives, a warm-up, an I-do/we-do/you-do sequence, guided practice and a plenary exit check, all anchored to Frida Kahlo – Self-Portrait and Symbolism.

Learning objectives and standards

By the end of the lesson, students will be able to interpret how Kahlo used symbolism in self-portraiture to express identity, pain and cultural heritage, and produce a short evidence-based response. This targets the Respond and Interpret strand of the Australian Curriculum: Visual Arts, and it develops the Intercultural Understanding and Critical and Creative Thinking general capabilities. For your South Australian records, note that this analytical skill scaffolds directly toward the folio and analysis demands students will meet later in SACE Stage 1 Visual Arts.

Warm-up (8 minutes)

Project a Kahlo self-portrait with the symbolic elements visible — a monkey, thorns, a hummingbird — but say nothing about her. Ask: "This person is telling you about themselves without words. What are they saying, and what's your evidence?" Students record three inferences. This positions symbolism as a puzzle to solve and gets every learner reading the image before any biography is delivered. Share a few readings, then reveal how closely Kahlo tied her imagery to her own life.

Explicit teaching: I-do, we-do, you-do

Use gradual release so the analytical move is modelled before it's expected.

• I-do: think aloud through one symbol — "The thorn necklace draws blood, so I read physical pain; the dead hummingbird echoes it as lost freedom."
• We-do: decode a second portrait together, you scribing a class symbol-and-meaning table.
• You-do: students independently interpret a third work, writing two symbol-meaning statements with evidence.
• Support and stretch: offer sentence stems for those who need them and a comparison prompt for those ready.

The symbol-focused structure of Frida Kahlo – Self-Portrait and Symbolism maps directly onto this sequence, so you can lift stimulus images straight from it.

Guided practice: your own symbolic self-portrait

Students plan a self-portrait in which at least three objects act as personal symbols. Ask them to sketch and annotate each choice — what it is, and what it says about them. Circulate with questions that push intentionality: "Why that object and not another? How will colour reinforce the meaning?" To lift the quality of their written analysis and their eventual folio annotations, run students through the response method in Analysing a Painting – Method, Vocabulary and Exam Training, which gives them a reliable structure of description, analysis and interpretation.

Plenary and exit check (7 minutes)

Close with an exit ticket: "Choose one symbol from your plan and explain in two sentences what it reveals and how a viewer would know." Collect these for a quick formative read on who can link evidence to meaning and who needs another pass. This also gives you assessment notes toward the Australian Curriculum achievement standard. If you want to extend the unit, a contrast with the optical, light-driven concerns of Claude Monet – Impressionism and the Painting of Light makes a sharp comparison — Kahlo painting inner worlds, Monet painting outer light — and deepens the intercultural thread for your South Australian students.

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