Bristol Museum & Art Gallery has displays of natural history, geology, archaeology, European Old Master paintings, British and European Art, Eastern Art and the Bristol School of Artists. There is also a programme of changing temporary exhibitions.
95% of all Bristol schools have visited one of Bristol Museums, or participated in museum-led activities, at least once in the past 3 years. Bristol City Council runs a reading recovery programme called Every Child a Reader (ECaR) to improve levels of literacy across Bristol.
Project Delivery
Caleb Parkin (Creative Writer) ran a workshop for staff at Compass Point Primary School to ensure they engaged with the project. Caleb then delivered eight sessions with classes, both in the school and at the museum. The sessions focused on engaging the children by using words in different ways to create a poem. They used a variety of materials and books to find the start and end of sentences. The Creative Writer called this ‘metaphoraging’. This approach took pressure off the children, as they were able to draw upon pre-written text. Pupils chose an ‘expert’ name for themselves. In one of the activities called ‘ten line growing poem’ the children produced a poem starting with one word on a line, then two, then three and so on. In the final performance the children held up picture frames to perform their poems and became a ‘living gallery.’ The frames helped them to act a role – that of a painting or their named expert.
