Blog: Learning

Over the past two weeks we have been running family activities linked to the Veolia Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2012 Exhibition here at National Museum Cardiff.

Over 400 of you took part and it has been a fantastic fortnight of photographic fun! I've been busy uploading as many photos as possible to the NMC Photo Club Flickr page and I have to say they look great! When you visit the Flickr page the photos are organised into sets on the right hand side of the page so if you took part all you need to do is click on the date of your visit to the Museum and look for your name!

The photos will be going up on the screen in the Clore Discovery Centre in the Museum on Saturday the 8th of September so if you came to the workshops pop in to see your pictures on display at the National Museum!

I'd like to say a big thank you to Cat, Lauren and Catherine for all their excellent work in running the workshops and I'd like to thank everyone who came along to take part as well. Thanks!

Ten young people gave up four days of their summer holidays to help make our whale and turtle displays more family-friendly.

They signed up to the challenge through Cardiff’s Summer Learning Festival, which invites 12-15 year olds to learn new skills in their spare time. They learned how to evaluate and exhibition, pick a good story, write interesting text and select objects to make a family friendly display.

Diolch i / Many thanks to:

Jasmine Coombes, Emily Frankish, Aled Gomer, Thomas Griffiths,  Samantha Hardy, Stephen Lloyd, Simon Naylor, Maxwell Piper, Anna Rees, Mollie Shand.

Amgueddfa Cymru - National Museum Wales is looking for new schools to be involved in this exciting project and receive free spring bulbs.

Spring Bulbs for Schools (KS2)

Plant bulbs in your school grounds to study climate change. Join this UK wide investigation and improve science and numeracy skills. For more details visit www.museumwales.ac.uk/en/scan/bulbs

The application only takes a minute to complete and the project  is FREE to all schools who apply by the 30th July.

On saturday, the Craftivists (well, the wonderful Sarah Corbett) came to Oriel 1 to help us make mini protest banners dealing with asylum seekers and refugees.

In the gallery at the moment we have an exhibition called Refugee House which is a recreation of a typical refugee or asylum seeker dwelling in Cardiff.

One of the intentions of the exhibtion is to raise awareness about the lives of refugees and asylum seekers in Wales and the rest of the UK.

We thought making banners with other Crafitivists would raise even more awareness about the issues - while stitching slogans and quotes on our mini banners we could really think about the words and discuss their meaning, and when we hung the banners up afterwards other people could read the quotes and perhaps want to investigate more.

It was a really interesting day and I met lots of lovely new crafters, we've hung up most of the banners, but there will be more to come - let me know if you see any!

oh and do go and see what other things the Craftivists do and see how you can get involved.

Thanks to Reynette from Oasis who gave us a bit more of an insight into the lives of refugees and asylum seekers in Wales by telling us about her work and experiences at Oasis Cardiff.

I met a lovely group this morning from 'families learning together' who took part in one of my looking at buildings sessions.

I sent them out to do some sketches and they came back with these beauties! We then turned the sketches in to 3d models and they were really wonderful!