In June last year we received an unusual invitation. It said, 'We need your help! The Oriental Museum has been asked to create an exhibition of objects that help people communicate with one another, but all the staff are too busy to be able to do all the work. Can your class become museum curators and design, create and host a Museum of Communication in your school?'
The initiative was linked to the National Year of Communication (see information box) and co-ordinated by Renaissance North East and the Speech and Language Therapy Department, County Durham and Darlington Foundation Trust. We were excited to take part in this collaborative project, but we wondered how we would engage our foundation stage unit children and make the experience relevant to such a young audience.
To help us decide what direction to take the project, we asked ourselves:
- What does 'communication' mean to young children?
- How do young children communicate with their peers, families and friends?
- What learning opportunities do we need to plan so that the children's museum can become a meaningful learning experience and something in which they have taken an active and leading role?
- How can we harness the children's current interests in making and acquiring objects for the children's exhibition?
In the early years, children are visual, creative and imaginative learners, so we felt the obvious focus on telephones, computers and the internet did not seem appropriate.
Reflecting on recent successful learning opportunities explored in our unit, we kept returning to the children's love of storytelling, dressing up, music, puppet shows, drawing, junk modelling and painting. We wondered, then, how we could harness these interests in their making and acquiring objects for the exhibition.
CHILD FRIENDLY
A key part of the project was to work in partnership with a local museum. In our case that was Durham University Oriental Museum and Botanical Gardens. After attending a planning meeting with Sarah Price, head of the Heritage Collections Education Team at the museum, I was relieved to discover that the museum galleries were a much more child-friendly environment than I had anticipated, and the staff responded positively to the idea of our children having some freedom to investigate and follow their own lines of enquiry.
Then, while touring the Chinese and Egyptian galleries, we realised that many of the exhibits 'communicated' through colour, design, pattern, drawings and shape. Was this the route into the project we had been looking for?
At the end of our meeting we agreed a timetable of events to introduce the children gradually to the concept of a museum and hosting an exhibition:
1 Initial object-handling visit by museum staff at school
2 Exploratory visit to the Oriental Museum and Botanical Gardens
3 Second school visit by museum staff to help with exhibition planning
4 Grand Opening of Museum of Communication at school to coincide with the Year of Communication monthly theme for November, 'Celebration'.
In addition to working with the museum, we planned for teacher-led and child-initiated learning experiences aimed at creating some of our own objects to display in the exhibition. These included:
- Experimenting with mark-making on various materials such as stone, slate, plastic, bark, cardboard and tissue paper
- A detective hunt around the village looking for environmental signs and symbols
- A half-term homework challenge to collect signs and symbols at home
- Making recycled paper from old paper products
- Puppet-making projects
- Investigating how headwear and accessories communicate their wearers' roles and functions
- Inviting families to lend us clothes and costumes that communicate meaning.
Staff at our on-site children's centre also joined the project by running communication workshops for parents and under-threes. They were supported by speech and language therapists and weekly 'Creative Explorers' sessions, run by family workers and designed to explore communication through music, feelings and expressions.
PROGRAMME OF EVENTS
Object-handling session by museum staff at school
In mid-September, staff from the Oriental Museum arrived at school with a box of objects, all related to the theme of communication. They presented a slideshow depicting people who are recognisable by their clothing, as well as familiar environmental signage.
Immediately the children felt engaged, especially when they correctly identified a firefighter, police officer, the Queen, a bride and a soldier! This linked to the second activity, which entailed working out the significance and meanings communicated by artefacts from the museum's ancient and Oriental collection, such as a Roman helmet and a Chinese emperor's hat.
While the children found the first task easy - because it involved people, signs and symbols from everyday life - they found the second activity much harder, and the subtle symbols of power and wealth were beyond their knowledge and experience.
Visit to the Oriental Museum and Botanical Gardens
In October, we visited the Museum and Gardens for the first time. Throughout the day the children were busy with a range of hands-on activities that developed the theme of communication.
In the Egypt gallery, they were introduced to different pharaohs and their roles, and created their own names using hieroglyph stamps on papyrus. In the China gallery they became 'museum detectives', searching for the various animals depicted on displayed objects that have meaning in Chinese culture, such as the rat which represents intelligence.
We spent the afternoon in the Botanical Gardens looking at plants and trees that have been used in the past for mark-making. We even saw a papyrus plant growing in the glass house.
Many of the children had never visited a museum before, so this visit was a vital experience that gave them greater insight into what a museum is, how it functions and how objects are presented - something which would stand them in good stead when the time came to design and create their own museum!
As we boarded the bus to go back to school, I proposed to the children that we make our own museum. The timing was perfect - the children decided this was a splendid idea!
Hosting our own exhibition
The museum visit had served its purpose well and after half-term we discussed ideas for hosting our own museum. The children had excellent recall of their day at the museum and provided lots of ideas, including
- museum tickets
- curator name badges on lanyards around their necks
- a museum cafe - posters to advertise the exhibition
- invitations
- a museum logo.
Sarah Price returned with some familiar museum artefacts to put in the exhibition. She also brought a range of Perspex label and display stands and modelled different ways to display our objects. At this point we introduced the term 'curator' and explained how every child would become a museum curator as they designed, created and then hosted their own exhibition.
In the days leading up to the exhibition we temporarily located three large free standing exhibition display boards in the classroom, each one focusing on a theme:
1 Communication through mark making
2 Communicating through environmental signs and symbols
3 Communicating through costume design and accessories.
Staff and children worked together collecting and mounting pictures, photographs, children's drawings, objects and information around each themed display board. Children also contributed to the task by writing information labels for the objects, designing and constructing interactive displays and producing entry tickets. However, by far the most popular activity was producing individualised curator identification badges, which were laminated and attached to blue lanyards.
The grand opening of 'Hidden Word, Hidden Meaning'
As well as inviting parents, family and friends to our exhibition, we also received the exciting news that Jean Gross, the Communication Champion for the Year of Communication, would come up from London to open our exhibition. On the morning of the exhibition we transported our display boards from the classroom and into the school hall and surrounded each one with low-level staging blocks which provided a range of different levels to display our objects on. The school hall and adjacent children's centre rooms were soon transformed into a colourful and vibrant exhibition hall, complete with a museum cafe, manned by parent helpers and older children.
For the grand opening, every child proudly wore their own curator identification badge - an item which held such importance that one parent reported that her son had refused to take it off and had worn it to bed that night! Each child had a VIP assigned to them and, using their new knowledge and communication skills, it was their responsibility to show the visitors around the exhibits and explain how and why the objects had been chosen.
We watched with pride as the children confidently escorted their visitors around the display stands and explained with great enthusiasm and authority the relevance and significance of each object on display. They revelled in being centre stage and taking a lead role in the whole project.
This was reflected in parent feedback. Finn's mother said, 'The exhibition was excellently carried out and very informative. Finn really enjoyed himself carrying out the tasks and you could see he was very proud of it when he was showing his VIP around. Brilliant.'
LEARNING OUTCOMES
The learning outcomes far exceed our expectations. From the start of the initiative to the grand opening took 12 weeks, and the children's focus on the project during that time was remarkable. Sometimes, it seemed like everything around us linked back to the Museum of Communication project. On Remembrance Day, we looked at the symbolism of the poppy; during Diwali we discussed the meaning communicated by the red 'bindi' mark on an Indian's forehead; at Halloween we looked at how the costumes conveyed fear and made us scared.
Both staff and parents noted that the children had become excellent communicators and increasingly aware of different forms of communication in the world around them.
Rhys's mother noted, 'Rhys talked so much about this project. It clearly was a huge boost to their own communication skills as well as helping them to think about different cultures and times.'
At the start of the project we had wondered if we could engage our children and make the experience of designing, creating and hosting an exhibition real and relevant to them. The success of the project was undoubtedly due to the close and collaborative approach between the museum and teaching staff, working with the children over the period of the project. This relationship provided the continuity and focus needed throughout the project towards the common goal.
As Jean Gross summed up at the grand opening event, 'The children's work was brilliant.
They had learned lots of new words, stretched their imaginations, and won't ever forget this experience ... I saw for myself what confident, competent communicators they had become.'
MORE INFORMATION
National Year of Communication 2011 aimed to promote and celebrate the communication skills of children and young people. Communication Champion Jean Gross has recently published her report,Two Years On. It contains 30 recommendations to Government, local authorities, the voluntary sector and schools on the future of speech, language and communication services for children. It can be found at www.hello.org.uk.
Tessa Fenoughty is foundation stage teacher at Middleton-in-Teesdale Primary School, Co Durham