Our Learning team offers

• Innovative programmes and workshops for schools supporting many areas of the curriculum at  different key stages
• Multicultural celebrations
• Family friendly activities
• Reminiscence work
• Arts and crafts workshops

The Outer Space

As work gets underway on Cheltenham Art Gallery & Museum’s exciting extension and refurbishment project, the Learning Team is settling into its new temporary home at The Outer Space, 3 St George’s Place, Cheltenham GL50 3LA. (Tel: 01242 515360)

Sited just around the corner from the museum, near the Badlands record store, The Outer Space will be the venue for a range of fun and entertaining activities this Autumn for children and adults. These include:

Edward Wilson Centenary Events

2012 marks the centenary of the deaths of Captain Scott and his party, including Cheltenham explorer Edward Wilson, on their return from the South Pole. Many events are being organised to commemorate this event, both locally and nationally (see www.scott100.org for details).

 

The Learning Team at Cheltenham Art Gallery & Museum would like to take this opportunity to remind our teaching colleagues that we offer a workshop on Edward Wilson which we can bring into school. The workshop uses a slideshow of Wilson’s evocative paintings and drawings, as well as items from our handling collection, to tell the story of this local explorer, doctor, scientist and artist. A selection of equipment that would be used by a modern explorer contrasts with the items used by Wilson so that children can compare the materials used.

 

We can also offer support, information and objects if you are planning projects around this topic – we would be happy to come into school to talk to you about any help we could give.

  

For more information about any of the above please contact

or

After-school Creative Writing Club

For children aged 8 to 12, the club uses objects from the museum’s handling collection as inspiration for stories, poems and diary pieces. Meets Tuesdays, 3.45pm to 5.15pm, first session 27 September. The cost is £10 per ten session block, payable at the first session. Please email book a place.

Art sessions for teens

If you would like to get creative, drop us an email with your ideas for a new Art Club for teenagers. What would you like to do? How often should the Club meet? When? After school or Saturday? Let us know your thoughts so that we can be up and running as soon as possible.

Remember when ...

Do you remember the days before mobile phones, computers and even television? Let our objects from bygone eras inspire you to share your thoughts and memories over a cup of tea and biscuit at our themed reminiscence sessions. Look out for details on our website for dates and times.

School Visits

We will be able to come out to you and offer sessions led by our Education team – for further details please see our brochure Come and enjoy the Learning Power of Cheltenham Art Gallery & Museum (PDF Format).  These workshops, which give children an exciting hands-on learning experience, have helped to earn Cheltenham Art Gallery & Museum a prestigious Learning outside the Classroom Quality Badge.

We plan programmes of practical workshops to help children and adults explore and develop their creative skills.  You can download our information sheets and Working with Secondary Schools showing the subjects we cover.

A new joint initiative between Cheltenham Art Gallery & Museum and the Gloucestershire & Warwickshire Railway is a World War II Evacuation Experience.  For details, please click here.

We can take collections out to local residental homes and day centres to inspire conversation and shared memories.

If you want to know more about our work in these areas please contact Faye Little and Sandra Ashenford, Museum Education & Outreach Officers. Tel: 01242 775702 or .

The following are examples of work recently undertaken by our Education and Outreach department:

Object Detectives brings ICT-rich activities to young teens, inspired by a wonderful mixture of items from leading museums in the South West of England, including Cheltenham.

Stilton Towers is the Art Gallery & Museum’s in-house movie!  Meet Morris Mouse when he pays a visit to the museum to have tea with Clara and Rosa, the museum’s resident mice. 

Timeportals is a website of free creative learning interactives devised to promote access to the collections at Cheltenham Art Gallery & Museum, and nine other Gloucestershire Museums, in a fun and accessible way.  These interactives are suitable for Key Stage 2 children and have been designed to be used by a whole class on the interactive white board, but can also be used with support by pairs of children working on a PC.  All the activities are in line with the National Curriculum and linked to generic learning outcomes.  The resource is available at http://www.timeportals.co.uk

Our interactives are:

• Museum Mystery, which enables users to virtually examine an 18th-century punch bowl from the collections, and to place a number of other objects on a timeline.
• Talking Pictures features PJ Crook’s Portrait of the artist watching her children grow, and three other paintings, onto which children can place speech bubbles, as well as using writing frames to compose a story.