Our last week of the expressive arts and culture module we went a trip to Kelvingrove Museum in Glasgow. Kelvingrove is one of 20 museums in Glasgow and is one of Scotlands most popular free attraction.

I gained a lot of knowledge from this trip for a future teacher. Before I always thought school trips would be expensive but for schools outside Glasgow it would cost around £20.  As a future teacher I feel it would be important to build positive relationships with local museums as it is a worthwhile learning experience and may be the only time children will get this experience will be through their primary school.

Our task in the museum was to choose a topic and take ten pictures throughout the museum. I chose family and love as my theme – which represents my evocative object.

Below are the ten images I took – there is a mixture between mothers and children, friends, marriage and religion. I have a range of different images from different galleries in the museum – I have taken picture of statues, ornaments, paintings and photographs which all share the common theme.

At the beginning I found this difficult to find what I was looking for, the museum has twenty-two galleries it was difficult to choose what galleries to go to that will have the images I’m looking for in a short space of time.

As a whole, I really enjoyed the trip to the museum and is somewhere I would visit with children in my class in the future. It is important for children to embrace culture and have the opportunity to visit museums and art galleries.

This week we used our sixty two words, that we were asked to think of at the beginning of the module relating to our evocative object, to create a  concrete poem.

A concrete poem is when the poets message is shown through an image rather than the words themselves. This is a contemporary way of writing poetry.

I found this challenging to think of the sixty two words at the beginning and then to think outside the box to convey the message through a visual image rather than through the sixty two words.

In the end I decided to write in black on black paper and choose three words than were the most meaningful to me and the other words written around those three important words. I chose the colour black as it commonly seen as a colour of death. I also liked the subtlety of the words around the other ones which would mean someone reading my poem would need to look closely at each of the words. Below is a picture of the poem I created.

The three words I chose were – irreplaceable, lucky and priceless. I choose these words because the ring can not be replaced, I am lucky to have had an important person in my life for so long and be given a sentimental part of her and the rings are special I could not put a price on them.

This is an idea I would take to a future classroom as it is encorporating different areas of the curriculum – literacy and art. The children would need to create a poem with their sixty two words and think of an object they could draw to reflect their evocative object and poem they created.

This week in the expressive arts and culture module we focused on creating sound scapes. I really enjoyed this lesson and would be an idea to create different sound scapes with children in my future career.

Sound scapes is an easy activity to plan and is child led rather than teacher led. Another positive to creating a sound scape is that it is a cross-curricular activity – music, art, literacy and HWB. The sound scape can link to lots of topics in the class and can be created with the inter-disciplinary topic of the term.

Firstly, we created a sound scape as a class relating to fireworks. We were asked to think of words associated with fireworks and then create different sounds to match the word. My partner and I were to create a sound for talking- our idea was to video the class talking and use this as our sound.

The main part of the workshop was to create our own sound scape in a group relating to any topic. My class on placement are learning about the rainforest – this may be an idea I would take forward to use in my placement. We thought of different sounds we would hear in the rainforest and what instruments would create a similar sound.

Below is a picture of our sound scape and a video of what our sound scape sounded like. Funnily enough, one of the sounds created was by one of the girls in my group laughing however it sounds like an animal you could maybe hear in the rainforest!

It was interesting listening to the other groups in the class and what topic they chose – some of my peers are extremely musical and creative and this was made clear with the sound scape they created.

As a whole, this was a beneficial workshop as it provided me with an interesting lesson idea I could take forward in my own practice.