MAGPIE – Secondary Schools Speaking and Listening November 25, 2009

Just had a great day planning a new speaking and listening project with Chorlton High School’s Caroline Morgan, Newall Green High School’s Louise Mills, artists Naomi Kendrick and Fiona Muir (from WFA Media and Cultural Centre), along with help from Stephen Welsh (curator of living cultures), Julie from Manchester City Council, and Louise, Cat and I from the Secondary Learning Team.  As you can see from the big planning map we made, there were lots of ideas!  You should be able to double click to make it bigger 🙂

Plenty more to say about this but I’ll save it for another time… to be continued…

More Tree of Life

Another great Tree of Life created last weekend… Inspired by Darwin’s voyage on HMS Beagle we collected animals from around the mammals gallery by drawing them and then added them to our own giant tree of life.

Drawing Inspiration 2009 with The Campaign for Drawing November 12, 2009

The Big Draw came to Manchester Museum for adults last month.  We used drawing to research, record and interpret the collections and explored the plant stores (or Herbarium) to make our own contemporary art work.

The Darwin Drawing Studio

Throughout October half term we created a Darwin studio so we could used drawing to collect and record specimens from all around the museum and in both of our Darwin Extravaganza galleries.  People drew like the illustrators of Darwin’s time (a bit like Stephen’s illustrated entomology book that you can see in the exhibition), made imaginary creature shadows from memory paper cutting, and created a giant ‘tree of life’ linking lots of creatures together.