Riverside Primary School

After making music without using any objects in week one, Mrs Fitzgibbon's Year 5 class from Riverside Primary School made their very own instruments in week two of their project!

They made tambourines...

                                

Shakers...

Rainsticks...

and Drums...

After half term Mrs Fitzgibbon's class will be spending the day at Eton College Natural History Museum and they will create their very own sound story based around objects in the museum's collection!

Cookham Dean's visit to Maidenhead Heritage Centre

On Monday 19th May Mr Edmond's Year 3 Class visited Maidenhead Heritage Centre to learn more about WWI,as part of the Artswork Museum Learning Project. 

Virginia, Maidenhead Heritage Centre's Education Officer, planned lots of exciting activities for Year 3 to have a go at and there were plenty of real museum objects and documents to have a look at up close!

Mr Edmond's class were already very knowledgeable about WWI and they were able to tell us all about the different countries involved and how the war started. At the heritage centre, they learnt a bit more about what was happening on the home front and a little bit more about what things were like in their local area.

They looked at postcards, ration books and menus and thought about what it would have been like to be a child during WWI. Using their imaginations, the class wrote postcards to family members and friends who would of been fighting at the front. They described what they would have felt, seen, heard and what games they would have played and what they would have eaten.

After hearing one of Maidenhead Heritage Centre's knowledgeable volunteers talk about life in the trenches and the different medals a soldier could receive, the class then had a go at creating their own clay medal!

Katherine, another volunteer from Maidenhead Heritage Centre, read a poem called 'In Flanders Fields' and everyone in the class made a poppy and added it on to a piece of artwork inspired by the poem.

During WWI there was a convalescent home in Cookham Dean. 'Moor Hall' was a stately home built before the Victorian period which was owned by Francis Devereux Lambert. He gave up his house in 1914 to be a hospital where patients could recover from injuries in wartime.
Year 3 looked at photographs of soldiers and nurses from 'Moor Hall' and then imagined what it would have been like to be a nurse during WWI and practiced how to bandage injuries.

Here's what Year 3 had to say about their visit..

"I enjoyed making poppies, writing a postcard and most of all I liked making a medal out of clay. Thank you!"

"I learnt that in the war there was a hospital in Cookham Dean."

"I learnt they used tokens to get food."

"I learnt more about rations and medals."

"I enjoyed writing my postcard."

Last Session with Larchfield Primary!

After being inspired by their 'tour through a tomb' talk by Eton College Collections staff in week 2, the students at Larchfield Primary school set about making an Egyptian Death Mask in week 3 of the project.

They each took a face mask and stuck it on a cardboard background and then covered it in paper-mache. The students loved making a mess of their classroom and slopping on lots of glue to make sure their masks were all covered! Holly and Zara noticed that the masks were starting to look like Egyptian mummies before we painted them!

After leaving them to dry for a week, we then painted our masks using different colours and patterns. Lots of gold paint was used to give the masks an authentic Egyptian feel!

At the end of the afternoon 23 wonderful masks were made! 

We would like to say a big thank you to Mrs Johnson and her amazing Year 4 class for all their hard work in the project! Well done!

Cookham Dean CofE Primary School

Tuesday afternoon was spent at Cookham Dean CofE School with Mr Edmonds' Year 3 class.  This was the first session of an art project based around the theme of WWI. The class had been working hard and had already learnt lots of information about WWI and how it started.

As a group we talked about how we remember what happened in WWI. What type of things do we get our information from and how is the war commemorated? We looked at the use of art to remember and commemorate WWI. Some of the things we talked about were war memorials, statues, war paintings, poetry, videos, television and films.

We then learnt about Paul Nash, who was a famous painter who became an official war artist during WWI. After learning about his life, how he became an artist and his role in WWI, in groups we looked at some of his paintings.

The paintings we looked at were:

"The Menin Road"
"Spring in the Trenches"
"The Mule Track"
"Ypres Salient at Night"
"We are making a new world"

Each group were then given time to do some 'free' drawing where they wrote on the piece of paper anything that came into their mind, inspired by Paul Nash's paintings. 

Next week Mr Edmonds class will be visiting Maidenhead Heritage Centre to find out more about WWI and learn about the Home Front.

Riverside Primary School

As part of the project Mrs Fitzgibbon's Year 5 class have been looking at the topic of 'Changing Sounds'. We started the session by introducing the project and the students were told we would be working on an art project so we began by thinking about the question 'what is art?' 

We then looked more in-depth at music as an art form. The students closed their eyes whilst listening to an orchestra playing at the proms. They imagined all the different instruments playing. After the music stopped they were asked which instruments they could hear - violins, pianos, trumpets and cymbals! We then set about answering the question "can we still make music if we have no instruments?"

The answer is definitely yes! 

Year 5 were given time to prepare a song in small groups using no instruments or objects and they then performed their songs for the rest of the class. Using clapping hands, clicking fingers and whistling one group performed a rendition of Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star whilst another group performed Three Blind Mice. Some groups even made up their own songs!

The groups were then given the same task, but this time they were given random objects to use as instruments! Paper plates, toilet rolls, pencils, paper cups, elastic bands and even tin foil were all used to produce sounds! We also watched some videos of a composer called Diego Stocco who makes music from everyday things! You can find out more about him here http://www.diegostocco.com/

After learning that musical instruments can be made from materials we find in our everyday environment we then looked at some instruments from different countries. We talked about what they were made of and tried to guess how they were played and what they might sound like.

We looked at a pagang from the Penan people in Borneo, Malaysia and a nose flute from the Nambiquara people who live in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil. These objects are from Eton College Natural History Museum and are part of a collection of objects which were brought back to England from all over the world by an explorer called Robin Hanbury-Tenison.

Here's what Mrs Fitzgibbon's Year 5 class had to say:

• "I enjoyed making music"
• "I enjoyed hearing music"
• "I enjoyed playing with objects and making sound with them"
• "I have learnt that there are instruments that are played by your nose!"
• "I learnt you can make music with all sorts of stuff"
• "I learnt that Diego Stocco uses everyday things to make music"

Next week we will be making our own musical instruments!

Larchfield Primary School

As part of the Slough, Windsor and Maidenhead Museum Learning Project, Mrs Johnson's Year 4 class from Larchfield Primary School have been working on a 4 week project focusing on Ancient Egypt. 

We began the project by looking at the question 'what is art?'. After a discussion the students realised that there are many different art forms that we see everyday!

The students then created a mind map of the different types of ‘art’ in Ancient Egypt, as this is the topic for our project. They came up with things such as the architecture of the pyramids, the jewellery and hieroglyphics.

 Hieroglyphics was the Ancient Egyptian writing system. Egyptians used pictures to represent different objects, actions, sound or ideas. There were over 600  hieroglyphs because they represented letters, sounds and even whole words! Year 4 learnt how to write their name in Hieroglyphs and then used an art technique called collaging to create a cartouche (A cartouche is an oval frame which surrounds the hieroglyphics that make up the name of an Egyptian God or royal person, it is meant to protect against evil spirits.)

Creating the collage cartouches...

The following week we were joined by Charlotte and Rob from Eton College Collections. Charlotte is an Exhibitions Officer and Rob is the Curator of the Ancient Egypt Collection. The children experienced a ‘tour through a tomb’ and were shown mummified hands, scarab beetles, amulets, surrogate mummies and canopic jars. There was even a piece of bread from Egyptian times!

Hieroglyphics

A piece of a canopic jar

mummified hand

A surrogate mummy!

A mummified hand!

A piece of bread from Ancient Egyptian times!

As well as learning lots of new facts about Ancient Egyptians, we also learnt about working in a museum. The children prepared a list of questions to ask Charlotte and Rob about what it is like to do their job.

We found out that curators wear white gloves when handling objects because they don't want to pass on the dirt and grease on their hands to the objects (some of which are 4,000 years old!). We also learnt that depending on the type of exhibition, it can take about 9 months to put on an exhibition. Sometimes it can nerve-racking being responsible for such important objects! Finally, we learnt that most people's favourite objects to see in a museum are the ones that  tell a story and get people interested in the topic!