We are now about half way through our artist led workshops in Cornish primary schools. Each workshop we have, or will, run uses local farming stories as a starting point for learning and creativity. We decided to do something different in each school, adapting to the area, stories, and schools, with some brilliant results.
The first workshop we ran was with Lanivet school, a lovely, small school near Bodmin Moor. Here we worked with the whole school over the day exploring Cornish dialect. Beginning the day with a digital story of local farmer John Bennallick, we then produced an alphabet of local dialect, matching words to images and then having fun with clay.
Each clay model fits on a small white wooden cube, which will be displayed in alphabetical order. Above is an ‘Urn’ (or Heron) being sculpted and a ‘wondering, worm eating want’ (or mole). By the end of the day the children knew a wide variety of dialect, recalling it with ease! We then (excitedly) welcomed John Bennallick himself into the classrooms to see what the children had done and share some stories with the children… a brilliant day!
We secondly went into Lanlivery school. Another small school, with over 1/3 of children from farming families. Here we invited family members to join the children for a day of storytelling, as well as getting children to get stories from people they know beforehand. We had a wealth of stories, from tipping sheep to pigs rolling up carpets, horses who knew when they had reached an acre and milking sat on an upturned bucket. Listening to these brilliant stories of past farming, the children learnt more about their farming heritage first hand. We then worked in groups to create some of these stories, illustrating large calico covered boards and boxes.
The results were brilliant and the children and adults were an absolute delight to work with.
