I got a sneak preview of the children’s latest work before Easter and we had a bit of a chat about their experience at Oxford Island. It was a really incredible day.

Huge thanks to Mrs Wilson and Alannah and to Emma and Elaine for making it so memorable. The children responded so enthusiastically to the collection. Before the visit we thought about what the children expected to see in the museum collection -everything from ducks made of clay to guns to ponds to fossils. Then Elaine showed some objects from the collection and talked about conservation of the material.

With Elaine I had selected some objects with different levels of fragility and robustness hat could be handled and cleaned. Because so many of the children had shoes in their memory boxes the Victorian shoes seemed to be a really good object to share.

The collection isn’t open to the public and this was the first and definitely the largest group that had ever been accommodated at any one time. We split into two groups for the tour with half of the group making drawings and writing notes from the first part of the day. We made lots of connections with the material in the museum and their memory boxes -visually, in terms of content. There were a lots of items in the collection that were exotic or unusual and these really engaged the children. At one point we were sitting in one of the rooms and it was very quiet and the children started to imagine all kinds of things -stories about the objects, stories about the building. The air was full of excitement and mystery. When the tours were over the children listed their most memorable objects and considered what the objects had in common with eachother: they were old/ fascinating/ cool/ easily broken/ dusty/ they had texture….

We could have another full session there and then about everything that they had seen but the bus came all too soon to whisk them away.

Again in the post I got a memory stick of images and felt that some of them really need to be shared. I will post some the children’s photos of their visit to Oxford Island soon. In all the excitement I almost forgot to mention that this was my first face to face session with some of the children. It really didn’t feel that way at all!