Central Unit blogs

www.tutteachers.co.uk

I have recently been involved in a project to write resources for schools visiting the Tutankhamun exhibition at the O2 centre and I thought some might find it interesting to hear about this and what was involved. I work as an Education Officer at the British Museum. Many people say that I spend my day colouring-in, which of course I do indulge in now and then, but there are many other aspects to the work. Normally you can find me teaching, writing schools resources or organising family activities.

The British Museum was asked by the Tutankhamun exhibition organisers to write the schools resources for the London leg of its journey. I presume that they wished to call upon the embedded expertise the Museum has to offer. Katharine Hoare, a very experienced Education Officer at the Museum, was asked to lead the project and I was asked to assist. This was fortunate for me as I was able to use Katharine’s guidance to really understand how to write resources and what they should consist of. A skill that is already coming in handy as our main Team objective this year is to rewrite and renew all of the schools resources offered by the Museum.

To begin the project we took a trip to Philadelphia to see the exhibition in-situ in the Franklin Institute. (I’ve never gone on a trip for work outside London before so this was rather a treat!) Our initial plan was to structure the Resource Pack in a similar way to resources that we write for the Museum. This would involve three main sections:

1. ‘Before the Visit’
2. ‘During the Visit’
3. ‘After the Visit’.

The During the Visit section would contain worksheets for the children to fill in during their visit. This is a useful way of engaging children and encouraging them to really study and make a first attempt at understanding an object. It also provides the teachers with material to use after the visit which reminds the children of what they saw.

However, immediately upon entering the exhibition we realised that there was no possibility of using worksheets. The lighting was way too low! We were going to have to invent a rather different resource pack.

Making our way through the exhibition the first time we just acted like normal visitors. We looked, read and marvelled at the objects. On our second trip round, the next day – even Museum professionals get exhibition fatigue, we took our notebooks out and really started work. Our objective was to locate key objects, find continual themes and begin to bring ideas together. With worksheets out the window we needed to find a new way of doing things.

The model that we hit upon still rested on the three sections of a resource pack, Before, During and After, but puts standard activities in different areas. The worksheets are now located in the After section and so still allow teachers to gather written evidence of work. We have provided Adult Briefing Sheets for the adult leaders of each group of children to use during the visit. And the Before section has short summaries of the history of this period, a list of Pharaohs, maps etc. Before and After sections both have suggested activities, questions and lines of investigation ideas. The pack allows teachers to choose different ‘routes’ of enquiry and practice. Four themes (Containers, Faces, Colours and Symbols) go through the entire pack allowing teachers to focus on a specific theme for the whole class or to split themes across groups. We have also included PowerPoint presentations of the four themes and our Signature Objects (one object from each room we think each child should see). These presentations can be used before the visit for familiarisation or after the visit as a reminder.

I really enjoyed visiting the exhibition, writing the pack and learnt a lot about resource writing for schools in general. I think the finished pack is useful for schools especially because you can choose to do as little or as much of it as you wish. I’m hoping that when I visit the O2 Centre I’ll see lots of excited children roaming the exhibition! The resource pack can be found at www.tutteachers.co.uk The site isn’t the easiest to navigate so keep digging and you’ll find lots of different PDF’s and PowerPoint presentations to download. Enjoy!