Wriggly Stories

Bury Art Gallery & Museum’s annual ’Wriggly Stories’ exhibition seeks to engage young children with Victorian paintings. A key part of this is empowering parents and carers to encourage their children’s play and learning. Each painting has two labels targeted at parents which give a chatty summary of actual or suggested stories behind the paintings and introduce the activities which are laid out on large carpet mats in front of the artworks. The museum has also run ’Wriggly Stories’ workshops targeted at parents who have missed out on formal education and for whom this is a chance to re-enter the learning arena themselves as well as to support their children. See
www.bury.gov.uk/LeisureAndCulture/MuseumsAndGalleries.

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Explorer Pad

Hackney Museum offers families a free ’Explorer Pad’ to help them to learn together about the themes of the museum’s interactive exhibitions: Journeys, Work, Home, Play and Food. Families can explore one theme during each visit, and the spiral-bound, colourful Pad also contains activities for back at home. For example, the Work section encourages families to try out old-fashioned sewing machines which were used in Hackney factories, to make a list of where their own clothes were made and to find out a bit of information about each country. See
www.hackney.gov.uk/hackneymuseum.

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Invention and Discovery

The XLWales Invention & Discovery Roadshow for Community Groups, based in South Wales, takes fun, hands-on Invention & Discovery Challenges into children’s clubs, family centres and to family events. It offers 40 Roadshow Challenge Sheets (downloadable from the website) for children and their parents or carers to tackle together, such as building a mousetrap which won’t hurt the mouse or creating a home for a family of bears. See www.xlwales.org.uk.

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Young mums at the Shipley

School-age mothers involved in a project at the Shipley Art Gallery in Gateshead created interactive books for their children. The books contained images of objects in the Gallery and a photograph of the child attached to it by a ribbon, so that the child could ’walk through’ the pages of the book and visit the exhibits in the Gallery. The whole experience was valuable to the mothers, both as children themselves and as parents. They enjoyed the craft activity, felt proud of their achievements, and started to engage with the museum objects. In addition, creating books for their children was a positive step in terms of supporting their children’s learning. See www.twmuseums.org.uk.

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Streetwise family learning

The ’Streetwise in Ryde’ project, run by English Heritage South East Region and the Isle of Wight Family Learning Service, inspired primary school children and their parents to really engage with their local built environment. They worked with an artist and musician to look at the area with completely different eyes and develop a personal response to it. They learned how to ’read’ buildings and how to find out about them through record offices and libraries. Finally, they developed games and activities to use in school and at home. The parents were just as excited about the project as the children, and many were inspired to do their own research into their local area, in order to support their children better.