Museum Professionals at Whiteman Park

Today we went along to the Revolutions Transport Museum at Whiteman Park for the workshop "Artefact Investigator". The children learnt how museums collect their artefacts, how they choose which to keep and ways to conserve and display them.

We got to go behind the scenes to the collection store where we examined some items from the collection. We wore white cotton gloves to protect the artefacts from oils on our hands.

Mini horse saddle

We saw some of the objects that are currently off display and not usually seen by the public.

Child's saddle

Horse drawn hearse

The children tried some archaeology and then cleaned up their artefacts.

Next they filled in a catalogue card, made and attached a label to their artefacts and set up a museum display.

We looked around the museum at the transport displays which included a really old tram car.

City Culture

There was a lot going on in Perth this weekend with several cultural festivals and exhibitions. First up was the KickstART art festival. The children got involved in making an outdoor sculpture whilst listening to various bands on the stage. There was also the opportunity to try out croquet.

As part of the festival the State Library of WA was showing the travelling sketchbook exhibition with art by young people across the state.

In the same area the Art Gallery of WA was showing Comic Tragics. The children, R in particular, enjoyed looking at the different comic art on display. We hope to draw some of our own this week.

Also showing at the gallery was year 12 Perspectives - some works by graduating year 12 students from WA.

We also took in the Buddha's Birthday celebrations at Langley Park. Of course everyone was most interested in tasting some delicious vegetarian Chinese foods.

Explorers Website

The children have been using Weebly to make websites. You can get an education account, add your students and build small sites for free. It doesn't cost much to upgrade and get more pages. Here are their first sites which are all about explorers. More pages will be added soon.

R's Website

L's Website

Portraits Shaun Tan Style

After our visit to the Shaun Tan exhibition (see previous post), we decided to make some portraits in the same style. First we needed a collage background like in the picture book "The Lost Thing". The children used torn pages of sheet music, novel and dictionary pages. They were stuck down with plenty of PVA and scraped with a credit card to remove any bubbles. We've scanned the collage sheets in to keep for another project.

Before we tried a Shaun Tan style portrait we practised drawing eyes, mouths, noses and faces using realistic proportions.

Next we looked at Shaun's pictures to determine what makes up his unique style. We noticed his faces are elongated and the features are narrower and placed lower on the face than in real life. The children made a second portrait using these proportions. We mounted the portraits on the collage background and added a close up on the eye and some decorative boxes like in the book.

By R

By L