Lifelong Learning
School Programme
One of the highlights of the year was our learning team being given the Sandford Award for Heritage Education. The judges said “this inspiring new education service shows maturity beyond its years.” This was a great achievement for a team that had only been operating fully for two years.
Our second annual Schools Programme was published, which included details of more than 30 book-able workshops at the three main sites, which all make links between our collections and National Curriculum topics.
York Art Gallery’s Studio continued to attract many bookings to workshops and the new Victorian school room in Kirkgate at York Castle Museum was used to host special Victorian Classroom workshops.
A Gladiator character in the Yorkshire Museum's Curia.
At the Yorkshire Museum, a new Roman-themed learning and activity room called The Curia was opened to co-incide with the exhibition, Constantine the Great – York’s Roman Emperor. This followed the opening of The Lab the previous year, a science-based learning space with an interactive white board, computers, digital cameras, sound recorders and microscopes. Both rooms proved valuable in hosting school workshops and other activities and were developed with funding from Renaissance Yorkshire, a partnership of museums, libraries and archives.
The learning team also contributed “learning journeys” to a new website for teachers and school children in Yorkshire, www.mylearning.org. Each journey describes a topic linked to museum or gallery exhibits and includes words, pictures, video, quizzes and interactive games.
Community Programme
During the school holidays we continued to organise activities at all our sites for children and families. At York Art Gallery these included a focus on portraits during the summer’s Icons and Idols exhibition, with activities ranging from faces in clay to DNA test tubes, and the annual Big Draw in October, which took its theme from The Art of Conversation, and invited guests to the Big Draw Tea Party. The Studio also hosted monthly Studio Saturday drop-in workshops for families throughout the year.
Creating sculpture at one of York Art Gallery's Territories community workshops.
Our Territories project, funded by Arts Council Yorkshire, continued into its third year at York Art Gallery, working with local community groups who might not otherwise have visited the gallery. The groups are invited into the gallery for activity sessions, culminating in a special celebration day at the end of the year. During the year we worked with 13 community groups, representing more than 200 people.
At the Yorkshire Museum, our holiday activities included a series of Wild Wednesday events in the Museum Gardens during August. Each week focussed on a different natural history topic. We also published a new booklet on the same themes aimed at young visitors to the gardens called The Garden Explorer, which went on sale in the Yorkshire Museum shop.
Our astronomy programme of events continued with Observatory open days and evenings, and regular talks in the Tempest Anderson Hall.
Constantine the Great – York’s Roman Emperorprovided the inspiration for many of the year’s other holiday activities giving children an insight into life as a Roman.
We worked with York St John University staff and students on the Constantine procession through York on July 25 and with York Minster on the commemorative service that day. We received a grant from Arts & Business Yorkshire which enabled us to give special evening access to employees of Shepherd Building Group, sponsors of the exhibition.
At York Castle Museum, our activities built on the new Kirkgate developments, adding extra activities in the street during the holiday periods. These ranged from Punch and Judy shows, policemen on stilts and jugglers, to extra characters including a Victorian schoolmistress, a washerwoman and a policeman. Our most popular activity, Life of Grime, looked at the darker side of life - visitors were invited to hunt for rats with our Victorian rat catcher.
One of the summer's Wild Wednesdays in the Museum Gardens.