Sea Hear workshop with Children

Exploration is about seeing things that are new (or not so new!) fully and with our eyes wide open. It is about the ability to focus and clarify what we are experiencing with all our senses. There is collaboration and technology involved in exploration, and navigation, as well as the adventure of trying something new.

In a way, with so much digital media at our finger tips we feel we do this all the time. ‘Click, click go our cameras’. But I feel we are often not truly seeing all the detail we could. This idea was the inspiration for my Traveller’s Tails workshop. I wanted to help young children to develop their seeing skills, while exploring new areas within the museum and learning about maritime history.

I was really interested in the Dingo and Kangaroo paintings by George Stubbs. These paintings were commissioned back in England, so the painter had not been to Australia. He could only use the sketches and verbal descriptions given to him to create the paintings! I wanted to set a task to explore the museum objects in a similar way.

The first workshop consisted of a group of 4 families with 7 children under 10 on a rainy saturday in October. After discussing Travellers Tails at the National Maritime Museum and the paintings I set about getting the children to choose an area of the museum they didn’t know about to find an object.

They chose highlighted maps and the children had to try (with help) to find their way to that room. Once they had chosen an object they recorded what they were looking at into an audio recorder (their parents mobile phones!)

We then worked as a group listening to everyone’s recordings and trying to draw the object that was described. It was great fun and the children were incredibly engaged and focused (with support from us adults of course). The process of listening to the different descriptions was fascinating and looking at the resulting drawings was interesting for us all, as they were surprisingly accurate. The children were tasked with looking at colours, scale, shapes, materials and the possible uses of object.

The workshop exceeded my expectations because it was a very new type of workshop that involved the participants leaving the workshop base and then returning to collaborate. The parents were also really good at helping the children engage with the task.

What was really exciting was going back to see all the objects after they had done the drawings and finding how the real object compared to the description. We could then look at the materials. In every case the children had looked at and engaged with something new in the museum.

The outcomes were multi-faceted and included collaboration, listening, responding to other’s work, language development, discovering new areas within a museum they thought they knew well. The children got to understand some objects in great detail and discovered that they might enjoy areas of the museum more than they thought.

They experienced using everyday technology in new ways and enjoyed museum objects as a group, as well as working independently and as a team. The parents were left with the skills to help their children enjoy galleries and museums in more depth and we all developed our thinking about how we can explore the world on our doorstep with fresh eyes.