Schools
and Education
Are you a school, college or university? You can commission us directly to deliver workshops, or collaborate with us on a funding bid for larger/longer term projects. If you’ve had an idea that we may be able to help you realise, then please contact martin.gooding@b-arts.org.uk for a chat.
As part of our youth engagement programme B.ARTS are sometimes able to offer schools workshops as part of existing projects, such as our neighbourhood-based lantern parades.
For further details on any of these offers, please don’t hesitate to get in touch
Please see below for examples of recent work in schools.
Light play and lantern workshops
with students at Watermill Special School in Chell
To link the school community at Watermill to our lantern event in Fegg Hayes (Lanterns in the Valley). We worked with staff and students from both the communication and curriculum pathways.
With the curriculum pathway, we ran 3-D lantern making workshops - with students designing and making a large scale magic rabbit lantern and multiple pyramid lanterns across a couple of days of workshops.
With the communication pathway we ran light and sensory story-telling sessions. Telling the story of the lantern rabbit leaving its soft, dark and cosy den and going on an adventure through different landscapes before diving through a magic pool and reaching a secret world of dance and music, before falling asleep and waking up back in its den.
The workshop included using a range of digital light play apps and projections (controlled by the young people), sensory props for the young people to interact with (facilitated by a performer) and a live music score to accompany the story (working with harpist Rachel Gladwin). The session included a mix of structured storytelling and free play.
Both groups took part in stop motion animation workshops (either as a class group or as individuals).
Their work was shared as part of the wider community event and we also held a sharing event and installation within the school.
"The children absolutely loved today’s workshop. The children were all so calm and absolutely loved exploring the different resources. The artists were great with the pupils and totally embraced the learning styles. We would definitely put our name down for another session if they come back in again!"
"I just wanted to say that the B.ARTS session today was lovely. The B.ARTS team had put together some great resources. Our pupils really enjoyed it and would happily have stayed for much longer! "
Exploring local history and creative writing
through Stop Motion Animation
We worked with year 5 at St Thomas Aquinas to create short stop motion animations bringing to life the heritage of the city’s canals. The films the children created are featured on the Stoke-On-Trent Living Heritage trail app, as part of the Canal Stories Trail.
Each half day workshop included small groups:
exploring a pack of heritage resources (from B.ARTS research, including archive photographs, newspaper articles and interviews with people with a boating background focussing on a different aspect of growing up on a boat)
Devising a short-animated story, including character creation and story boarding.
Using archive resources to draw characters and objects to animate
Scripting and audio recording dialogue
Creating the animation (using a digital camera) and stop frame software.
If you are a further or higher education establishment with theatre, visual arts/crafts, textiles or community arts or arts administration/management programmes or similar, you might be interested in buying in one of our team to deliver a talk about their work as an artist to your students.
Further Education & Universities
If you’d like to talk about potential workshops or talks in your school, college or university then please get in touch to discuss!
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