Features
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WORLD BOOK DAY 2010
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Kids in Museums volunteer Victoria Wallop has looked through her bookshelves to find stories that mention museums. Here’s what she found…
How many of us have reached for Topsy and Tim visit the Dentist or Spot’s First Day at School to help prepare our children for a new event? There are a surprising number of books for children that are set in museums and reading them can help you prepare your child for a visit.
For very young children, there are titles like Miffy the Artist, Dick Bruna’s inconic colours and shapes explaining simple artistic concepts like the way different colours make us feel. After her visit to a gallery, Miffy is inspired to go home and create her own works of art, as were my children, aged 7, 5 and 3 who turned our kitchen walls into a gallery after reading the book.
There are lots of titles for pre-schoolers from the charmin Maisy Goes to the Museum, to and Harry and his Dinosaurs who go to visit, you’ve guessed it, the dinosaur museum and Curious George and the Dinosaur, in which the cheeky monkey inevitably gets into trouble. Dickon, aged 3 says, “It is a really very nice book. I like it when George climbs on the dinosaur”.
Paddington Bear’s trips around London are as entertaining to today’s children as they were 30 years ago. Paddington at the Tower makes the story of the Tower of London’s ravens accessible to a three year old, when it turns out that ravens are particularly partial to marmalade sandwiches. Paddington Bear has to make the heartbreaking decision to leave his marmalade behind at the Tower rather than risk the ravens following him home and the Tower falling down. We read this story before visiting the Tower and it made the group of black birds on the grass take on an altogether new and dramatic significance for my small children.
In James Mayhew’s Katie series, a small girl jumps into famous pictures bringing their stories alive. They are delightful books in their own right, but they also make visiting galleries with small children a joy. Having read Katie’s Picture Show many times to our children, we found ourselves sheltering in the National Gallery one wet afternoon. The children raced around, spotting the pictures from their book, excited to be seeing them full size and full of observations and questions. Eve aged seven says “I like the way Katie goes into the pictures and tells a story, the pictures are very artistically drawn.”
For school age children, there are titles such as Dan’s Angel which explains the meaning behind paintings when Dan becomes a detective, decoding the symbolism in classical art with the help of a friendly Angel Gabriel. Like the Katie books, it also helpfully tells you where the featured pictures live.
When Kay Thompson’s Eloise goes to Paris she visits the Louvre, explaining that you have to “tippy toe around on the parquet floor” and then causes her usual chaos when she checks her pets into the cloakroom.
There are a number of books for over tens in which a museum is the setting for an adventure story such as The Stoneheart, which opens when George breaks a dragon’s head outside the Natural History Museum awakening an ancient power. The Museum’s Secret is an exciting adventure set in the incredible Scatterhorn Museum. The hero Tom discovers the secrets of the museum’s dusty exhibits, travelling through time and place, from an Edwardian ice fair to the Mongolian desert.
A book I loved as a child and which my daughter loves today is From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs Basil E Frankweiler. Claudia is disatified with her life in a New York suburb, so she and her brother Jamie run away to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a magnificent place to hide. As well as detailing their everyday life, hiding from guards, washing in the central fountain and sleeping in antique beds, they also discover a mystery about the museum’s newest acquisition and set out to solve it before they get caught.
Some of these books are great for helping children to understand what they are seeing when they visit museums, others use museums as the backdrop to exciting stories. All of them have a place on the bookshelves of children who visit museums.
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HENRY MOORE EXHIBITION
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Kids in Museums volunteer Maggie Monteath roadtested the Henry Moore exhibition at Tate Britain, London for us. Here’s what she found…
With lots of space to wheel buggies between super sized exhibits (or to spread out you Kids in Museums Mammoth Activity Sheet) this exhibition has lots of potential for a family visit.
There’s just one text panel in each room, short quotes displayed on the walls and minimal text on object labels so adults or older children can easily pick out basic information that might interest the younger members of the family. The exhibition is arranged chronologically; the earlier sculptures are easily recognisable as people and includes lots of mother and child sculptures, a great opportunity for families to talk about something familiar and the kids will love the masks. Moving on the sculptures become more abstract but the gradual progression makes it easy to see they are just a different way of representing people. Children could be further engaged with the sculptures through the surprising range of materials Henry Moore used in his lifetime. The final room containing four human sculptures in elm is stunning.
Another surprise awaits mid-exhibition where Moore’s wartime drawings are displayed. He compares his drawings of Londoners sleeping in tube stations with the hold of a slave sip. They certainly are a far cry from the ‘chirpy Cockneys cheerfully getting on with life despite the bombings’ usually presented in school projects.
Despite visiting without any children I was able to tick off nine points on the Kids in Museums new Manifesto and a further six after talking to some visiting mums with toddlers. There are three things families need to know before they visit Tate Britain. Firstly both side entrances have ramps and lifts. Secondly, although a family ticket for this exhibition is a pricey £31, children under 12 go free, and most importantly talk to the staff about your needs, they appear to be highly ‘family friendly’ and most accommodating.
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FEBRUARY 2010
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Review of Hetty Feather by Jacqueline Wilson
Inspired by her work with the Foundling Museum, Jacqueline Wilson has written her first historical novel for the 8-11 age group. Given up by her mother at birth, Hetty Feather starts her life in a poor but loving home in the countryside. She believes that her parents and siblings are her own family, but just before her sixth birthday, a terrible thing happens. She is forced to leave the ‘mother’ and foster brother she adores and is returned to the Foundling Hospital where she started her life. This is all based on historical fact: foundlings who were lucky enough to be given a place at the orphanage set up by Thomas Coram were fostered as babies and then brought back to the Foundling Hospital to be trained for a life in service or agriculture. Hetty has to get used to the harsh life of a Victorian orphanage because even though the establishment was based on the liberal principle of giving protection to lost children, it’s regime of iron discipline, poor food and the lack of comfort and love will seem very harsh to today’s young readers.
It’s particularly hard for a naturally rebellious character like Hetty and even the wonderful stories and make believe world she creates for her few friends is not enough to hold her there. So begins her great adventure. In time honoured tradition, she runs away to join the circus, believing that the wonderfully named and alarmingly red haired Madame Adeline is her own mother. But her hopes are dashed. She discovers how grim the world can be for a poor Victorian orphan and begins to appreciate the relatively safe, protective world of the foundling hospital.
The young reader who loves a happy ending will not be disappointed when Hetty is finally reunited with her own mother, the loving kitchen servant Ida who was forced to give her up after Hetty’ father died at sea, but was lucky enough to find work where she could keep a watchful eye on her own girl. The book has a great cover and wonderful black and white Victorian ‘silhouette’ drawings by Nick Sharrat.
Publicity for the book and the illustrations led me to believe that Hetty was going to be one of the first positive disabled characters to feature in a historical novel for young readers, but this isn’t the case – she’s small but perfect. The two foster siblings who are disabled are disappointingly stereotyped: Martha with ‘poor squinting eyes’ who can neither remember nor speak very much and miserable Gideon who walks with a cane and is called a ‘cripple’ and ‘idiot boy’ by the other children. Neither of these characters are allowed to develop or grow in the book but in a recent article in Disability Now magazine, Jacqueline Wilson promises that in the future her books are going to feature disabled characters that ‘everyone will recommend’.
Reading Hetty Feather would be a great way to begin a visit to the Foundling Museum and children would find many interesting parallels: the uniforms, examples from the children’s school work books and the descriptions of what they were given to eat. They can look at the drawing of the wealthy visitors who gawped at the children eating their Sunday lunch and read Hetty’s thoughts on what it felt like to be stared at like animals in the zoo.
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DECEMBER 2009
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A Visit to centre of the cell by Rhys Morgan
My three-year-old daughter seems to be an old hand at visiting museums now but nothing prepared either of us for what we saw when we visited the Centre of the Cell, based in Whitechapel, east London. It’s not really a museum as such, but more a fully interactive one-hour experience. Aimed at nine-years-plus, the Centre of the Cell is an educational facility all about the building blocks of life. It’s the first museum of its kind, based inside the real working environment of Queen Mary, University of London’s bio-sciences research laboratories. The ‘pod’ where the show is held is suspended above the scientists whom you can see working beneath you as you enter. Once inside and everyone’s settled down (the pod seats up to 50) the show begins. Giant screens show movies up on the ceiling. A huge console in the middle of the space opens up to reveal touch sensitive tables providing all sorts of interactive games and virtual science experiments. You even get to see your own body parts on high-power microscopes.
The Centre is free, there are very friendly staff who are all eager to help and explain, and there are plenty of loos at the entrance for those who’ve travelled from afar. There’s a very reasonably priced café - sadly there’s nowhere to eat a packed lunch at present but the management ensure me it’s on their list of priorities. There’s even a gift shop which has lots of items for under a pound and nothing more than £3. To be honest the content was too old for my daughter but the staff and I were all amazed at how she was amused for the whole time.
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SEPTEMBER 2009
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Interview with comedienne Josie Long.
At the moment you are on tour in Australia. Have you had much time for cultural activities: reading, music, visiting museums or galleries? Or is it a very rock’n'roll sort of tour?
Hey I did do a lot of reading (but I’m ashamed to say I read a really trashy book about a woman who was kidnapped by a conman who said she was on an IRA hitlist. Brilliant.) And I did a few gigs with a band called The Lucksmiths, who are fantastic and beautiful songwriters, but I am ashamed to say I didn’t go to many galleries or museums in the month, which is quite out of character for me. I saw quite a few comedy shows though but a lot of time during the day I would be doing writing and boring stuff! I did just get back from doing a gig in Paris where I went to the Museum of the Middle Ages. It was so good! It’s in the ruins of a Roman bath house, and it’s full of tapestries in old French. So cool! There were so many objects from daily life in 15th century Paris and it was so interesting!
Did you enjoy going to museums as a child? And what about as a grown-up, do they offer inspiration now?
Yes i did! Especially anything about children, which I think came out of being spoilt and self-interested! I remember going to a National Trust house with an old nursery full of toys and being fascinated about how mysterious and sad it seemed. Yeah as a grown up they really do inspire me. I like reading the little plaques next to things and making up silly stories behind them. I like how suggestive old things are, and just the amount of things there are to learn about. I’m interested in history and being a stand up you’re always trying to write about people and so it’s nice to try and make connections with people from the past. I wrote a show that focussed a bit on the Pitt Rivers Museum, and how full of curiosities it is. And i’m really interested in the period between about 1700 and 1900 when people were really into categorising and understanding the world and also to making that knowledge public and accessible.
What are your top five museums to visit now?
Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford; Natural History Museum in New York; the V&A in London; any small provincial museum about a niche subject! e.g. Elgar’s Birthplace Museum; the Enlightenment exhibition at the British Museum - it’s SO inspiring. I wish with all my heart that I was an 18th century gentleman!
On your recent Radio 4 show All of the Planet’s Wonders, you used reference books to ‘better yourself’. Do you think visiting museums and galleries improves people and if so, why?
Yes of course! Just exposing yourself to more things makes your brain better! And gives you more of a frame of reference. And I think it’s important to try and learn as much about world history as is possible, just to get some perspective on what’s going on. I think it stops you from getting bored or jaded too. Plus it’s wonderful to look at beautiful things and things that were made with great effort and difficulty!
What would the Josie Long Museum have in it? And who would visit it?
I’m a hoarder! It would have so much useless tat. I guess a lot of diaries and notebooks, as I’ve kept them for my whole life. When I was a kid I remember reading about how Tracy Emin set up her own museum and that inspiring me a bit. I really like archiving my life, but I think nobody else would find it of the slightest interest. I think it comes from being a writer, you sort of want to feel like you’re the hero in an interesting story.
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JUNE 2009
A fascination with flying machines - Click here to read Dea Birkett’s article about Brooklands Museum in The National.
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MARCH 2009
Tate Britain and South London Gallery: the young people taking over our museums.
Two London museums have this month opened their doors to groups of young people with some interesting lessons learned on all sides.
At Tate Britain, sculptor Nick Hornby and jazz musician Soweto Kinch have been working with a group of young people from a selection of London schools on a series of ‘disruptions’ – art that interacts with five pieces in the Tate collection, accompanied by a specially composed sonic trail, all inspired by the current Altermodern show.
When Nick Hornby began working with the young people on this project, he made no concession to their ages or backgrounds, discussing Derrida and post-structuralism with them as they formulated the work.
What is remarkable about the finished pieces is that unlike many art-education projects, there is no distinction between the voice of the artist and that of the young people involved.
During the 10-week process of creating the disruptions, Hornby says that he was particularly impressed with how the students worked together as a group.
“They were so accepting of one another, which my peers aren’t, they’re all cut-throat and horrid, so that blew me away,” he says, adding “I found it really fun hearing young people voice opinions before being completely smothered by irony and politics.”
For Soweto Kinch, who had never composed a piece so closely connected to a visual art practice, he says the experience took him and the students involved well beyond their normal comfort zone. “For the first two or three we were just forging a new language, because we didn’t really have a roadmap or a fixed destination in mind,” he laughs.
When they heard the final version of the sonic trail, Kinch says the response was “overwhelmingly positive, because they could see how they’d shaped the final piece.”
Indie Choudhury, curator of Tate’s Visual Dialogues programme, said that for her it was crucial that this project was not set apart from the Tate’s main collection but cemented right in its heart.
“It’s a balance between giving young people ownership or co-authorship with the artist,” she says, “and also enabling the institution to realise that young people and artists of different disciplines, and maybe different cultural backgrounds can also have a say in the cultural production of meaning.”
• To see images of the disruptions at the Tate click here and follow the link to Visual Dialogues at Tate Britain.
At the South London Gallery, a group of students from two Southwark schools took part in a debate about their experiences of museums and galleries.
The debate raised some fascinating and fresh ideas, including a suggested hotline from the gallery to the artist that you can call if you do not understand a piece of work and special noisy times in galleries set aside just for teenagers and young people.
• To see images from the debate and read more of the suggestions that came up click here and follow the link to Talkeoke at the South London Gallery.
• Please post a comment about your experiences of visiting a museum or gallery by clicking here.
• For more information on these projects visit tate.org.uk and southlondongallery.org
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FEBRUARY 2009
Joanne Young was recently chosen as the first British member of the Walt Disney World Moms Panel. She talks to Kids in Museums about what makes a great day out for her and her two daughters.
Tell us about your role on the Disney Moms Panel
The panel is a question-and-answer website. People that are going to Disney World send in questions and they are answered by the panel. It’s supposed to be like asking your best friend for an independent answer – we’re allowed to say if we think something’s rubbish. I’ve answered over 100 questions, from ‘what’s the dining plan?’ to obscure ones like ‘what times will the tigers be awake on the safari?’
What sort of days out do you like? Do you ever go to museums?
My husband works all day Saturday so we go on days out once every couple of months. This year we had membership with the National Trust and visited Leeds Castle as well, but we have done Maidstone Museum lots of times and the ones in London. The Natural History Museum is our favourite London museum.
What are your golden rules for a family day out?
We don’t like crowds at all so as soon as the place opens, we’re there. There’s not so many people, you get so much more done and you can see things better. And if there are things to touch or to do, there’s a much better chance of doing them. We often find that we’re gone by the time most people are arriving. Also I know this sounds silly, but go the opposite way round. Most people go right – go left. That way you see more too. We always take some snacks with us just because we don’t like paying extortionate prices, and it’s nice to have something to eat when you want.
What can museums and theme parks learn from each other?
With a theme park, you can research it a lot more online. You know what things will be suitable for your child by the height restrictions and they all have a map. It can be quite daunting to go in and not really know where you going. Everybody checks things online nowadays, so you get an idea of what your children wouldn’t want to do, as well as what they would. With Disney World, it isn’t all about the rides, it’s just about the whole feel of the place. Everybody’s really nice and polite. They smile.
Do friendly staff help families to relax? In some museums parents might worry about their children doing something inappropriate?
It is all about having the children interested in stuff and then they won’t cause a problem, or do something that would be frowned upon. At Leeds Castle, the people that work there although they look very serious but when the children go up to ask them something, they are always so helpful and really love taking time to talk to them. As long as there’s something to keep the children’s interest, like a trail, our children love museums just as much as theme parks. It’s good to give them a variety of stuff.
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