Make and Take a Reindeer Hat: Family Activities

It's almost Christmas and at the Pitt Rivers Museum we are feeling festive.  This year we have had our Pitt Stop Have yourself a Shiny Little Christmas where families had the chance to make shiny Christmas coins using real metal sheets.  We also had our Under 5s Rockin' Reindeer event looking at all the reindeer related objects in the museum.

Ivory Model of Reindeer, Siberia 1884.1.6 © Pitt Rivers Museum 

The Pitt Rivers Museum has many objects associated with reindeer, either made from parts of reindeer or models of reindeer.  Our most well-known reindeer object is the reindeer milk cheese from Norway displayed on the Lower Gallery, which is over 100 years old! In the Court (ground floor), there is a carved ivory model of reindeer pulling a sled in the Ivory and Bone case, reindeer knickers from Siberia in the emporary exhibition My Siberian Year, 1914 -1915, plus clothing made from reindeer skin and fur. There'll also be a reindeer harness and an unusual Swedish reindeer-skin shoe appearing in the new Leatherwork display on the Lower Gallery very soon!

Reindeer Milk Cheese 1886.12.2 © Pitt Rivers Museum

Reindeer Knickers 1915.50.111 © Pitt Rivers Museum 

Reindeer Hat © Pitt Rivers Museum

One way to get festive this year is to make your own reindeer antlers. They are very easy and simple to make and can be created at home. Follow this link for instructions - How to Make a Reindeer Hat.

From all the Education and Learning staff at the Pitt Rivers Museum, we wish you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Make and Take a Feather Headdress: Family Activities

The Pitt Rivers Museum has many beautiful objects and we took a closer look at these during this October half-term.  This was a joint event with the Oxford University Museum of Natural History (OUM) who focused on 'Beasts', therefore making 'Beauty and the Beasts'!  Over 1,200 children attended the three-day event with their families and friends and we had a great time making feather headdresses, armlets and tooth necklaces. In the OUM they made beastly sloths and cock-eyed squids.

Have you ever thought about how people make themselves beautiful? Well in the Pitt Rivers Museum we have loads of examples of how people from all over the world and from the past have made themselves look beautiful. Our ideas about beauty are all culturally determined so it is difficult to explain ‘real’ beauty when a defect in one country is desirable in another. Different cultures view beauty in so many different ways so beauty is in the eye of the beholder!  How do you make yourself beautiful?...

South American Feather Headdress PRM 1886.1.907 © Pitt Rivers Museum

During October half term we made beautiful headdresses based on examples from the museums collection. Here is an example of a South American feather headdress that is on display in the museum, it is made from the brightly coloured feathers of a Macaw bird and Green Parrot.

Make and Take Feather Headdress © Pitt Rivers Museum

We made feather headdresses using paper feathers like the ones below. Would you like to make one at home? Here are a few steps to follow to make your very own! Firstly make a headband by cutting out a strip of card and measure it around your head to make sure it fits. Glue on the feathers to the inside of the band. Then wrap the band around your head, again measuring to fit, and then staple it together. Now it’s ready to wear!





Feathers to Cut Out © Pitt Rivers Museum



Making Museums Project

Our Education Intern describes her involvement in our Clore Award for Museum Learning winning project Making Museums:

"It has been an incredible two months being part of the Making Museums project with both the Pitt Rivers and Oxford University Museum of Natural History (OUM) education teams. My main aim from my traineeship was to be involved in more delivery of sessions - and I can safely say I have certainly achieved that with this project! As Making Museums is a partnership between both museums and eleven local schools in Blackbird Leys, Cowley, Littlemore, Rose Hill, Barton, Wood Farm and Headington, we taught almost 500 Year 6 students.

During the first month Aisling (the OUM Education Intern) and I were overseeing the delivery of sessions within the schools. Here the children discussed ‘what is a museum’ and what are the roles of people who work there. They also had an opportunity to explore real museum objects to discover what they were made of and what they were. They would use their senses to explore each object (but not taste!) and would ask questions to help further their discovery.

The next step was for the children to come to the museums and follow the journey of an object on its way through a museum.  Firstly the children would reflect on what they did when we came out to their school and would warm up their object investigation skills with a ‘what is it’ game. Here they would be presented with objects and would be given three options; they would need to decide on what the objects were by using their senses.

After a discussion about how we find objects in museums there was the big reveal that they would in fact be archaeologists for the day!  We then took the groups of very excited children to their own archaeological dig. It would be their job to dig carefully and as a team to discover what was underneath! 



The Dig! © Pitt Rivers Museum

This part would often be quite frantic, often stopping to remind the children to dig carefully. Once finished we discovered the skeleton of a human body and around it were some real museum objects. It was really interesting to hear how the children were already coming up with suggestions about who the person might be from their observations.

Mapping the Dig © Pitt Rivers Museum

The next step was to map the dig and then to document specific objects.  We explained how objects need to be recorded when received at a museum so we can see their condition and record any damage.  It was then time to go behind the scenes to see real museum professionals in their work environments.  Here they would learn the importance of conserving objects.

Researching Artefacts © Pitt Rivers Museum

Children then researched their chosen objects in the Museum.  Finally we gathered back to reconstruct the dig and hear what everyone had found out about their objects.  In this way a picture was built up of who this person might have been: Where did they come from?  What did they do for a living?  And how did they die? We had some very imaginative ideas.





Sweet Tasting at St Andrews© Pitt Rivers Museum

The final part of the project entailed the children going back to their schools and making their own museums.  We really enjoyed going to visit their class museums and seeing how they engaged their visitors.  One group had researched different sweets and you can see me here doing a blind taste tasting of their favourite sweets.  This was a very popular display!

I think I can say for both myself and Aisling that we have thoroughly enjoyed delivering the project and have a great sense of achievement from all we have done."  

Hannah Eastwood
HLF Skills for the Future Trainee

Contrasting Bodies: Art Workshop at the Pitt Rivers

The day long workshop 'Contrasting Bodies' was run this autumn by Salma Caller (Adult and Secondary School Art Education Officer at Pitt Rivers Museum) and Adrian Brooks (Joint Oxford University Museums Art Education Officer).



Contrasting Bodies Artwork © Pitt Rivers Museum

This workshop is organized once a year for sixth form art students to explore Western and Non-Western representations of the body using the Oxford University Museum Collections. Each year an artist is invited from a different cultural background to explore ideas about the body, identity, beauty, anatomy and proportion and how the body is represented in art.

This year artist and illustrator Anna Bhushan came to the Pitt Rivers to work with sixth form students from local Oxfordshire schools. Students worked collaboratively with Anna, exploring how the body is represented, protected, controlled, altered, ornamented and embellished across cultures.

Anna Bhushan graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2004. She now divides her time between London and New York. She also teaches at Cardiff Metropolitan University at the Cardiff School of Art & Design. Anna has won numerous illustration awards and has illustrated several Folio Society publications, including The Bhagavad Gita and Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie.


Students explored the Pitt Rivers Museum looking for objects that represented the human body literally or metaphorically, searching for materials, forms and patterns that were used to alter the body in some way. Sketching, taking photos and notes, their visual research was then taken back to the workshop to be used in image making. Working with a limited palette of metallic colours of silver and bronze, black, yellow, red and white, we passed our templates round and round, back and forth, each person adding, taking away, altering and developing each one as it came to them.

Anna describes the process in the workshop:

 “Each image began with a projection of a Persian anatomical drawing that was traced. We then responded to this ‘template’ working collaboratively and drawing into it, on top of it, around it. Sometimes this felt like an opening up of the body, other times as if we were clothing, decorating or altering it. Some of them were approached a bit like the consequences game (exquisite corpse) in which bizarre and unexpected characters emerge.”

You can see some of these intriguing collaborative images here.



Contrasting Bodies Artwork © Pitt Rivers Museum

Contrasting Bodies Artwork © Pitt Rivers Museum



Salma Caller
Adults, Communities and Secondary School Education Officer

Pitt Stop: Round, Round, Get Around

On the first Saturday of the month we run Pitt Stops at the Pitt Rivers Museum. Pitt Stops are afternoon drop-in family workshops that everyone is welcome to attend, and each month we explore a different theme linked to the collections. In October we looked at travel and transport with our exciting workshop, Round, Round, Get Around. One hundred children attended the workshop with their parents and carers between 1-4pm. They had a choice of making a car, a plane, or a boat. The car proved to be the most popular activity, and for this children could make a small model car that was powered by a balloon! It was a great activity that encouraged children to use lots of skills including thinking and planning as well as physical making and construction. When they had finished making their balloon-powered car they could then test it out on the racetrack that I had set up in the museum.

Racing balloon-powered cars! © Pitt Rivers Museum



Salama boat model! © Pitt Rivers Museum

The Pitt Rivers Museum has lots of boats, which I discovered from running an under 5s event called Row, Row, Row Your Boat. One of the best boats is the Salama boat, which is used for fishing in shallow waters. The boat has an outrigger sticking out of the side which helps it to float as it does not have a keel underneath to steady it like many other boats.  Children also had the opportunity to make a model Salama boat to take home with them. One of the great things about the balcony location of the activity is that if you look above you there is a large Salama boat hanging from the ceiling, so children can see the ‘real thing’ they are trying to replicate.

It is a good idea to have a contrast of modes of transport as it encourages children to think about the different ways in which people have travelled in the past, and how we ourselves travel today. They also have a chance to think about why people use these modes of transport in certain environments.

 Recycled aeroplane PRM 1998.9.7 © Pitt Rivers Museum

Children could also have a go at making a paper aeroplane model and they could pretend to fly on the Pitt Rivers Airline using the runway I set up in the museum. Children enjoyed creating the planes and seeing if they could make them fly.

This activity was fun and interactive and families enjoyed being able to design something based on the Museum's collections. The collections include a range of transport models made from metal cans and containers, like this aeroplane.

You can hear more about the aeroplane and how it was made in a refugee camp in Uganda, here:



I am looking forward to our next Pitt Stop on Saturday 6th December running between 1-4pm where we will be making shiny Christmas coins to get into the festive mood.  It is called Have yourself a shiny little Christmas and we will be discovering beautiful things made from metal.  Looking forward to seeing you all there!

Carly Smith-Huggins
Family Education Officer

Pitt Fest 2014: Sunshine, music and craftiness in all its glory

Pitt Fest 2014 © Pitt Rivers Museum

Our second annual Pitt Rivers Museum festival – Pitt Fest – has been and gone, and what fun it was! The sun shone and over 3,000 people came on a September Saturday to make, handle, listen, watch dance, eat, drink and be inspired by a wide selection of stallholders and activities. The weather couldn’t have been better, with groups of people sitting all over the lawn in front of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.

Pitt Fest: Need / Make / Use describes the cycle of necessity, ideas, design, experimentation and production that has driven technological change and innovation in all cultures from the deep past to the present day - essentially, how people USE the things they have to MAKE the things they NEED. This year Pitt Fest was bigger and better than ever, with six different zones including the performance stage, a workshop zone, a family crafts village, a food corner, craft market and extra activities and tours inside the Museum!





Spinning Workshop © Pitt Rivers Museum



The Festival is a chance for people of all ages to get hands-on with some of their ideas about the collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum. Who made that object? What for? How and with what materials? Do we use something similar today? 











Carve a Carrot Recorder Workshop © Pitt Rivers Museum

The ‘Carve a Carrot recorder’ stand was especially popular, with over 80 carrot recorders being made in 2.5 hours. Children and parents were busy all afternoon making balloon-powered cars and boats, cord bracelets, drumming and henna tattoos, all run by our museum volunteers. Special thanks to our fabulous volunteers for delivering such great activities – we will do this again next year!



Lunas Dance © Pitt Rivers Museum

The stage hosted an array of music and performances for all tastes. Spoon workshop participants displayed their new skills whilst Sol Samba and the Oxford Ukeleles hosted some uplifting Carnival style music. The bell ringers were the ‘headliners’ of the event, having performed at ‘Britain’s got Talent’. For the first time we hosted a dance performance as part of the event - Lunas Dance put on a fantastic trio dance performance on the lawn.

Pitt Fest Trail © Pitt Rivers Museum

The inside of the Museum was equally busy with extra History and Highlights tours, Introductory Talks, Architecture Talks as well as a small lamp making activity on the Lower Gallery. The special Pitt Fest Trail kept people on their toes by challenging them to design a shield or finding ingeniously made objects such as a sieve made from a movie canister!

The Pitt Rivers worked with over 47 partners this year. New things were tried and tested to build on the successes of our first ever Need/Make/Use festival in 2013, and we were delighted with how the day unfolded. NMU Day is a FREE event and very much a collaborative effort, so we'd like to thank all the following who will be exhibiting, demonstrating, performing, providing refreshments or who have supported the event in some way.

Henna Tattoos © Pitt Rivers Museum

The date for next year’s Pitt Fest will be Saturday 5^th September 2015 - we hope you will join us next year for another day of fun, creativity and discovery!

You can find more photos of the day’s highlights on our FacebookPage.

Our Art Education Officer

Hello - I’m Adrian and I am the art education officer across four of the Oxford University Museums, which include the Ashmolean, the Museum of the History of Science, the Pitt Rivers and the Oxford University Museum of Natural History Museum. I have been in post for the past six years and before that I was a Head of Art in a secondary school in Oxfordshire.

Adrian Brooks - Art Education Officer © Pitt Rivers Museum

My role is to support secondary and college art groups visiting the collections. In practice that means offering tailored introductions, running workshops for pupils, organising teacher INSET, preparing educational resources and generally keeping the museums high on the teachers’ agenda.

Last year we focused particularly on the use of digital sketchbooks as a means of collecting information during a museum visit. Fortunately we were able to secure funding from Arts Council England through their Major Partner Museum funding programme.  As a result we have been able to create an online learning package that includes a series of short films. 

Here is an article I co-authored with Helen Ward, Deputy Head of Education at the Ashmolean, reviewing the project. 

Styluses versus Pencils

The use of digital sketchbooks in museums and galleries

As Museum educators in Oxford we work with literally thousands of pupils every year who visit the collections of the Ashmolean (Oxford University Museums) to research their art themes.  Interestingly we also see hundreds of Asian pupils on group visits engaged in a similar task of research. One of the subtle differences between the two groups however is that the British pupils come armed with pencils, while the Asian pupils carry styluses.

This observation prompted a series of discussions with the local network of art teachers called Oxford Art Teach (OAT) and colleagues from the NSEAD in which we mapped the use of digital sketchbooks as a tool for research among secondary art departments. The results were a patchwork of answers shaped by financial constraints, the multiplicity of apps and a lack of technical confidence.

Working with the Ashmolean, and with support from Arts Council England through their Partner Museum Funding Programme we decided to make a series of online tutorial films. In partnership with The Marlborough Church of England School, their art staff and year 9 and 12 pupils, we featured 3 free apps; Pic Collage, Brushes3 and 123D Catch. The Oxford University Media Production Unit filmed in the galleries of the Museum and in the school sessions: 

You can watch more of the films here. The aim was to show how simple, effective and fun tablets are for gathering information. We found in every session the pupils were engaged with annotating, photographing, drawing, editing and searching the web to extend their research. We hoped the films would also provide the inspiration for teachers to start integrating these technologies into their future museum and gallery visits.  

On reflection of course there is no real battle between the Stylus and the Pencil. The pencil offers the potential for scale, immediacy and a personal signature that is unique. But in terms of quickly harvesting information in a museum or gallery, the digital sketchbook wins hands down. It can replicate media from watercolour to oil paint, capture, crop and store photos, annotate, draw with anything from charcoal to a 6H pencil, and then undo and start again in second.  Finally, the work can be sent home and arrive before the pupils have left the galleries.

Read more about the digital sketchbooks project.

Welcome Carly!

Our new Family Education Officer, Carly Smith-Huggins, joined us at the end of August and has already organised several events.  Here she is to tell us a bit more about herself and about how she got on with her first Under 5s event.  

Our new Family Education Officer! © Pitt Rivers Museum

"Hello, I have just joined the Pitt Rivers Education team as the Families Education Officer. I will be delivering all the family activities and workshops that happen in the museum including Pitt Stops and special sessions for under 5s. I am really excited about getting stuck in and creating activities and resources for all families to enjoy.

For the past 8 months I have been working as the Heritage Learning Assistant at the Museum of Oxford, which is based in the Town Hall. Whilst I was there I worked with families and schools, and adult community groups. I managed and delivered the family programme, delivering monthly family workshops about the stories of Oxford on a variety of topics from the Romans to the Tudors, as well as designing trails. I also worked with adult community groups to inspire them to produce artwork for an exhibition that is going to be opening this month in the Town Hall.

Before that I was a HLF Skills for the Future trainee working with the Oxford University Education departments to become a Museum Education Officer. I did three placements at the Ashmolean, Museum of the History of Science, and the Museum of Natural History.

I have been at the Pitt Rivers for four weeks now and have run three events so far; making masks, parrot fish lanterns, and sponge boats! This week I ran an event called Row, Row, Row your boat for under 5s. For this we made Sea Explorer Hats and Sponge Boats. I also took the children and their carers around the museum on a Row Boat Adventure Tour. On the tour we looked for boats in the museum finding out a bit more about a few of them. We could have spent all day looking for boats, as there are so many! We also spotted some hidden treasure under one of the museum cases… There was also a model of a Salama boat for children to play with and use their imaginations to pretend they were at sea.

Carly Rows out to Sea © Pitt Rivers Museum

I am really enjoying my new role at the Pitt Rivers Museum. I am looking forward to working with the Education team and discovering more about all the fascinating objects in the museum and handling collections. 

Look out for our next Under 5s event on Thursday 9th October 10.30-12.30, and 14.00-16.00 which is all about Animal Antics!  Come and see what animals you can track down in the Museum..." 

Bags and bags of fun

Here is our intern Hannah reporting on family backpack activities run every Tuesday over the summer between 2-4pm:

"Well what a busy summer it was handing out backpacks to the public! Lucky visitors had the chance to borrow a backpack and explore the collections in the Pitt Rivers and Oxford University Museum of Natural History.

Visitors would pick which collection they would like to explore and then take their bag around the Museum to discover many wonderful objects. In the Pitt Rivers the bags were based on our Egypt collection. You could dress up to look like the god Horus or even wrap each other up like our mummy!

The Oxford University Museum of Natural History either had a bag all about dinosaurs (always very popular!) or a bag to explore all things creepy crawly. But if you were going to be a true explorer you of course needed to take your very own explorer hat to complete the look!

Modelling Explorer Hats © Pitt Rivers Museum

My task was to make sure that all our bags came back, were checked and recorded so they could be sent off again. This was often a rather lively task and we would have a queue of visitors eager to get going to explore the Museum with a bag. We had to try our best to stay calm and go as quickly as possible. We worked out that over 50 bags went out each time!

Handing Out Backpacks© Pitt Rivers Museum 

 

It was really lovely to see so many happy faces taking their bags around the Museum and I think the parents really loved having an extra thing to help engage their children with the collections. We received great feedback about how wonderful it was for the children and that it was suitable for all ages- even for little ones that could just sit down calmly and have a play".

BIG (British Interactive Group) Event

Here is the Volunteers and Outreach Officer, Caroline Cheeseman, to tell us what she got up to at the BIG event  this summer which was hosted by the Pitt Rivers Museum, the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, and the Museum of the History of Science:


"Between 23rd and 25th July 2014, 183 science communicators from around the country gathered at the museums for the BIG Event 2014. BIG (British Interactive Group) is a skills-sharing network full of lots of creative, energetic, enthusiastic people working to raise the profile of science, technology, engineering, and maths.


"There was plenty of the hard science you might expect, but I wanted to present an alternative way of thinking about scientific understanding as part of the session, ‘Is there a Doctor in the House?’, so while other presenters talked about nasal speculums and penicillin, I talked about teaching the history of medicine using ‘non-medical’ objects.

A fertility doll, a food cover, and a fox… © Pitt Rivers Museum

"Passing around an assortment of museum handling objects, including a kohl pot, a fertility doll, a food cover, various fossils and amulets, and a fox, I talked about everything from objects as alternative medical records to objects as protection against the Evil Eye. I was especially pleased with one of my slides, which showed two southern Italian amulets associated with the goddess Diana: one from the Pitt Rivers Museum and the other from the Museum of the History of Science, making the point very neatly that they can be understood in many different contexts! You can hear more about some of the charms against the Evil Eye on display in the Pitt Rivers in this extract from the visitors' audio guide:

Ammonite carved with snake's head. PRM 1985.55.1015

"Using a slug on a thorn – one of my favourite Pitt Rivers objects – as inspiration, I finished by talking about sympathetic magic: challenging the audience to a guessing game. Once they got the hang of looking for ‘correspondence’ (the idea that the appearance of an object in some way resembles the cure or protection it is believed to offer), they were able to see how people might think that both a fossil ammonite, which looks a bit like a curled-up snake, and a Martynia seed amulet, which looks a bit like snake fangs, could be used against snake bites. As for the fox, well, you’ll have to look up ‘Pulmones Vulpium’ to find out..!


"The presentation was based on by a six-week Joint Museums Outreach project I did with a local Mind group in 2012."

Museum Discovery Day

Last month Salma and Maya trialled their new Need Make Use workshop for Museum Discovery Day with over 100 Year 8 pupils from Marlborough School, organised into 3 groups.


Need Make Use Workshop © Pitt Rivers Museum

This new workshop aimed to get students thinking about human creativity and ingenuity, and how people design and make what they need from the materials they have around them. 

Object Handling Table © Pitt Rivers Museum

An introduction to the Pitt Rivers followed by discussion and object handling got the students thinking about what needs people have - from the basic need to survive to more complex things like art, culture, communication and identity. 

Students had to consider how to design and make an object so that it would do what it is meant to do. But they also had to think about how the design would be influenced by factors such as materials, environment and identity. Each scenario was created by students choosing an identity, an environment, and a need from three different pots. 










One group selected a chief from a mountainous region who needed to design a mask to use in a ritual that would help the community deal with a difficulty.  If this sounds like a really tall order, Marlborough School rose to the challenge in an ingenious way.  They decided that the problem the community had was making money so they designed a mask made out of goatskin and leaves marked with the symbols and colours of success - red, gold and money signs.  The students felt that this should be a bright cheerful mask used to round up the community to creative positive vibes, get people networking and talking about how to make life and business more prosperous, so they could sell more mountain goat products like cheese, milk and things made out of hide. 

Another group designed a fierce animal mask that a ten-year-old boy could use in the forest to help him prepare for his first hunting trip. They felt that masks help us transform ourselves, so the boy could pretend to be a fierce hunting animal and then feel brave and strong ready to join the men on the hunt. 



Annotated student design © Pitt Rivers Museum

Here is an example of a student design for a specific need, identity and environment.

Having fun and being imaginative and creative was the order of the day.  Well done Marlborough school for coming up with so many fantastic creative designs and standing up in front of everyone to explain them.

Goodbye Simone

We are very sad to say goodbye to our brilliant Family Education Officer, Simone Dogherty, who has left to become Family Learning Programme Manager at the Museum of London.  Her last day was Friday 12th July and as she also worked in the Education department at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, she totalled five celebratory leaving events.

Over lunch we quizzed her about some of her highlights and she said the project she was most proud of was Toys for Smiles.  This was a project done in collaboration with The United Nations Refugee Agency, Aviation Without Borders and the International Scouts and Guides Federation which encouraged local families to donate toys which were sent to a Syrian Refugee camp in Za'atri, Jordan.  The aim was to connect local and international children through the common medium of toys.  Over 2,200 toys were collected from local families and packed into 114 boxes which were sent to Za'atr.  

This moving short film shows some of the very toys packed by Simone and her colleagues being distributed to children:

We asked Simone what key skill her successor would have to have and she said strong arms to put all the tables up!  Diplomatically she also said that the best thing about the job were the people she worked with.  The nature of her post meant that she worked with a lot of volunteers and she was well known for giving them her favourite biscuit - a jammie dodger.  So of course one of her presents had to be a jammie dodger cushion! 
  

Simone and the Jammie Dodger Cushion © Pitt Rivers Museum

We wish Simone a fabulous time at the Museum of London but we are going to miss her good cheer, superwoman efficiency and creativity enormously.