British: Born and Bred

 

Dogs featured in Breed: The British & Their Dogs

British: Born and Bred is the title of a new session that we’re running for Key Stage 3 and 4 students to accompany our fantastic new temporary exhibition, Breed: The British and their Dogs.

The exhibition opens on Saturday 6th October and explores the links between historic concepts of Britishness and ‘man’s best friend’:  the dog. It highlights six different pedigree breeds that all have unique connections to British culture. The exhibition has been developed with The University of Manchester’s Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine.

British: Born and Bred is a 1.5hr session that will encourage students to engage with the exhibition and explore the concept of what it means to be ‘British’ and how dogs have grown to be a symbol for this, and many other things. The six pedigree dogs included in the exhibition content range from the Bulldog (so often referred to as the ‘British bulldog’) to the Collie (a standard sterotype for the British Countryside) and even feature the Borzoi (a Russian breed that became a favourite of the Royal Family).

Students will be able to investigate the links each breed has with British history and culture using the various source material in the exhibition. By the end of the session they should have a better understanding of how the concept of Britishness developed throughout Victorian and Edwarding times and the effect this has on values and attitudes today.

It’s a brilliant opportunity to interest students in the subject of History through a unique topic area, demonstrating how historical research can cross over into multiple disciplines and inform us about a concept still relevant today.

For more information on this session, please contact Cat Lumb, Humanities Secondary and Post-16 Co-ordinator.

Learning Placement Experience

This week we have been very fortunate to have the help of aspiring Religious Studies teacher, Sophie Hall, who has been working with me on the Secondary Humanities programme.  Here’s what she had to say about her experience:

“So I have just spent 3 days at the Manchester Museum with the Learning Team and it was fabulous! I have just finished my degree at the University of Manchester and will be on my way to Liverpool in September to start my PGCE. I came to the Museum to experience education outside of a UK school setting and don’t think I could have gotten a better experience. The Learning Team are extremely organised and very lovely; my time with them has been really great.

While at the Museum I got the chance to wander round the galleries and made links between objects and Religion and there were loads! I really wasn’t expecting to be able to compare and contrast as much as I could but found it extremely enriching. It was possible to make links in every gallery to religion, even in the Money Gallery. I had the chance to make up some possible session plans, connecting to the galleries. As a future teacher the only teaching experience I have had has been in a classroom so to imagine teaching on a gallery was completely alien but turned out to be a really good task for me.

Coming to the Museum I expected to leave with the necessary information to understand education outside a school setting but I’m leaving today with much more. The sessions plans I have seen give opportunities to every student and I’m sure would be incredibly popular with those pupils who struggle to learn in the classrooms. They have links to the curriculums, challenge students in ways that is often lacking in schools and allow students to explore the world they live in, both past and present. I have really enjoyed my time here and will definitely be bringing my future students for a visit!! Thank you Learning Team!!”

Sophie was great at highlighting links with objects on gallery that I would never have thought of, and her specialist knowledge on Religion has created some really exciting potential resources and session ideas for the programme. It’s been great to host Sophie’s placement and we wish her all the best in her PCGE at Liverpool.

Ancient Worlds school resources on their way!

Can you spot what’s on our Ancient Egyptian timeline?

I have been very lucky this week to have the creative input of some very talented staff here at the Manchester Museum who have painted ten key images from ancient Egyptian history onto our new canvas scroll. This visual timeline will be used with visiting school groups during the new Egyptian gallery primary school session, ‘The Egyptian World; museum secrets, mummies and pyramids!

A huge thank you to Karen, Sam and Cornelia for their wonderful creative work,  it looks fantastic! We hope to see many schools enjoying and exploring this ancient Egyptian timeline very soon.

How to Build a Museum in your Classroom

It’s always fantastic to hear that the Museum and its displays have provided inspiration for pupils in their classrooms – the range of things produced is always varied and creative and we really enjoy hearing about them. However, when Irlam Endowed Primary School contacted us, we couldn’t have imagined just how inspired they had been by their recent trip to the Museum!

On Friday 20th April, Debbie and David from the Museum Learning Team were delighted to join Year 4 pupils and class teacher Tracey Whittaker at the school, to open their very own museum in their classroom. They were enthralled by the accuracy and amount of effort that had gone into everything, from the design of displays to accurate labels and the pièce de résistance of a 5.5m long replica whale skeleton hanging from the ceiling – just like in our Living Worlds gallery!

It was a real honour for the Museum to be part of the school’s celebrations and to join them in their own museum. So thanks very much to Irlam Endowed Primary School and please do let us know if the Museum has inspired you.

Ancient Worlds and Current Programmes

Most of my time this month has been spent on reviewing our Secondary workshops in order to make the most of our upcoming Ancient Worlds development and the fantastic opportunities for Key Stage Three and Four students to engage with the collection here.  Topics to explore include Archaeology, Empire and Identity with the chance to develop student’s interpretation and enquiry skills as well as utilising critical thinking whilst investigating objects as direct evidence of the past.

The new galleries are going to give visitors a great overview of Archaeology and the contributions that our diverse collection of objects can make to our understanding of the past, in addition to analysing the different techniques used to explore this past. We’ve also got a spotlight on ancient Egypt as an Empire with a focus on examining the daily lives of specific individuals such as pyramid builders and will even include Asru, our temple priestess. There will be a very different approach to interpreting Egypt presented in this gallery, with the museum exploring how the ancient Egyptians themselves viewed their country and also how Egypt is an African civilisation influenced by surrounding cultures. The final gallery, upstairs, will be possibly the most visually stunning and potentially the most likely to adapt over the coming years: visible storage areas will be created, current research will be presented and themes will be explored in addition to object biographies to make sense of various parts of  the collection.

To follow the progress, or find out more, check out the Ancient Worlds blog for more details.

Right now, having worked through some of the workshops and identified the potential links for the Secondary sessions, I’m really excited about the possibilities and opportunities the Ancient Worlds galleries will present for students and their teachers. The galleries will, in conjuction with the other permenant exhibitions here at the Museum, engage students with their curriculum subjects and hopefully provide them with a memorable experience to help them learn about the past, the present and even influence their own future.

Ancient Worlds development is moving along quickly!

Do you remember this object? It has been on display in our previous permenant Egyptian gallery for many years.This picture was taken by a Gifted and Talented pupil from Oswald Road Primary School right here in Manchester. What do you think it is?

I’m currently working on how the new primary taught sessions here can engage, excite and allow young people to explore the galleries and their fascinating objects to find out for themselves how past civilisations used to live.

It’s a very creative time, lots of ‘thinking BIG!’ and learning from what has worked, or not(!)  in the past to make it a truly interactive, explorative and stimulating learning experience for all.

Hope to see you in the new galleries in November!

GCSE and A-Level Geology workshops

During the past few months, we have seen a surge of interest in our GCSE and A-Level Geology offer.  It is great to see students fascinated by our specimens and engaging with museum experts, such as our Curator of Earth Sciences David Gelsthorpe. We have a selection of different geology workshops that can be tailored to meet the needs of specific groups, from Understanding and Interpreting Fossils, Trilobites and Exceptional Preservation.  For the full menu of session available, please see our website.  Workshops can also be supplemented with wow-factor fossil session and gallery tours as required. 

We have welcomed Altrincham Boys Grammar School, Aquinas College and Balshaw High School to the museum over the past few months.  Below are a few pictures of the workshops in action.  If you would like to book any of our Geology workshops, please do get in touch.

Alan Turing and Life’s Enigma Exhibition

Our latest exhibition ‘Alan Turing and Life’s Enigma’ opened at the end of March.   The exhibition coincides with 2012 Turing Centenary Year, celebrating 100 years since Turings birth. Alan Turing is known to most people as a mathematician and pioneer of computing, as well as being a significant part in the solving of the Enigma code at Bletchley Park during WW2.  However the main focus of this exhibition is his work relating to biology, specifically to his fascination of how pattern, shape and form appear in nature, in a process known as morphogenesis.  In 1952, Turing published this work in a paper (The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis) describing a model showing how these patterns could develop from the interactions of two chemicals. The new exhibition combines material used by Turing during his research time in Manchester with objects from the Museum’s extensive natural science collection.  The exhibition is in our 3^rd floor exhibition space and runs until 18 November 2012.

As with all our exhibitions, we are developing a learning offer to allow students to explore further the ideas in the display.  Due to the high level content, we are planning a KS4 workshop and a series of Turing related A-Level Study Days, during the summer and autumn term.  Initial details of the workshops are below:

Maths/Science Turing workshop for KS4 – 2 hours, £75

This hands- on, interactive workshop will allow students to explore the scientific contribution of Alan Turings work.  Students will investigate how codes were used in early computing, the numerical patterns found in nature, and how it links to the Fibonacci sequence.  Though facilitated  learning on the new ‘Alan Turing and Life’s Enigma’ exhibition and getting up close to the museums collection, this session shows applications of maths to the natural world and cleverly links both science and maths curriculum.

Turing A-Level Study day, part of Engage with the Experts series (Full day) £150

Through a series of talks by University of Manchester Academics, hands – on activities and debates, your students will discover how their A-Level studies relates the last work of the famous scientist Alan Turing.  They will find out more about embryonic development, morphogenesis and pattern formation in living things and the Maths behind ‘Patterns in Nature’. 

We will be offering a few sessions free of charge during the trial phase (May/June/July), so if you are interested in this offer, please do not hesitate to get in touch.

You can get involved with your own Turing experiment, by growing a Turing Sunflower! 

Manchester Histories Festival: 24th Feb – 4th March

Between the 24th February and 3rd March we joined in the celebrations for the Manchester Histories Festival 2012. In the Museum’s Learning Team we were invovled in a couple of activites and events that had Manchester History at the centre of them.

Firstly, The Museum had a stall during the celebration day at the Town Hall on the 3rd March – which included a photography exhibition created by some Post-16 students from Tameside and Hyde-Clarendon Colleges based on objects in our collection that they believed represented aspects of Manchester’s diverse history. The eighteen students worked really hard, with only fifteen contact hours with the Museum’s collection and one another in order to research, choose objects, take photographs and write labels and an introduction panel in order to create their final exhibition which looked amazingly professional on the day. Some of the students also attended the Saturday event to help engage the public in their exhibition.

The Museum also hosted some Manchester History focused workshops in collaboration with the University of Manchester’s Widening Participation Department and the Whitworth Art Gallery on the 5th and 6th March. In these, the Whitworth and the Museum’s collection were used to highlight an awareness of the links they have with Manchester as a city and what they can tell us about Manchester over the years.

The formal educational activities were a huge success, although they were only a small contribution to creating a magnificent Manchester Hisitories Festival involving a number of events and activities happening across Manchester at various institutions and organisations. It was great to see so many orgnaisations coming together to celebrate such an important subject; so much so, we’re already looking forward to the next one in 2014!

The Midden Project: An experiment in archaeology

This is a Guest Post by Lauren Martin: an intern working in the Museum’s conservation department who has been involved in one of our Secondary education projects. 

Recently the Manchester Museum has been working with eight Year 8 pupils from Matthew Moss High School in Rochdale on an experiment to demonstrate the decay and survival of everyday objects. The children were asked to bring a range of objects into school. These included coins, old shoes, ceramics, a golf ball and even a half-eaten doughnut in its paper bag! Over the course of two sessions at the school, the pupils were first encouraged to discuss what they thought happened to different materials after they were buried and how they might look if they were excavated by archaeologists many years later. They were then shown how to photograph, draw and record their own objects accurately as well as having the opportunity to examine them under higher magnification.

A third session took place at the Museum itself where the children buried their objects in a compost heap or ‘midden’ in the Museum Allotment. The objects had each been cut into three by the workshop: two pieces for burial and one piece to remain out as a control. Much fun then ensued (despite the cold!) as the compost bin was filled with alternate layers of compost and objects.

The project was great fun for all involved and the response from the Matthew Moss pupils has been really positive:

“I think this project was a superb idea and is just plain awesome, because it shows us how different materials can degrade as well as some materials which can’t degrade. I enjoyed looking at the artefacts and burying our objects, because not only did we learn a lot of things but we also did some physical activity which is something we don’t do in the classroom.”

“I think the project was fun and I have found out a lot about history. I really enjoyed working with the museum staff…”

 The aim is that the same students will return in September 2012 to excavate the objects which will then be used in the creation of a display in the Museum’s new archaeology gallery: Ancient Worlds.

[With many thanks to Velson Horie, Samantha Sportun, Cat Lumb, Lauren Martin, Anna Bunney and Tracy Martin.]