Nice Things to Have Been Involved with: Gressenhall Museum - Farm and Workhouse

I mentioned in an earlier post how Terry Lamb's pupil voice research inspired me to create a curriculum which responded to pupils' desire to be able to use their French creatively and for real purposes. One of the most exciting things to come out of this was a long-running collaboration with Gressenhall Farm and Workhouse and the Norfolk Museums Education department. In particular Collie Mudie and then the incredible team of Jan Pitman and Mike Crisp.

At the Farm, there is a Stamper Trail, where parents are dragged round by excited youngsters, keen to get the stamps of the different animals on their sheet. What we did was get our Year 7 to create a French version of this trail, which is then made available to visitors to use.

 Everyone in Year 7 makes their own version. These are then judged and a committee of pupils are invited, under the supervision of the Year 9 International Leaders, to create the definitive version to be printed for the Museum.

As part of this, Jan and Mike have come into school to launch the project in assembly, commissioning the pupils to produce quality work for a real purpose. Also we have taken groups of pupils to the Museum to do their finished trail, including not just our own pupils but Primary feeder schools and our Spanish exchange visitors.

This was the original idea: to create projects where our pupils could use their French for real purposes and real audiences. But other important aspects came out of it. If you look at the example pictured, you can see that it has another purpose in developing pupil creativity. It provides a new context for all the language previously learned in Year 7. Pupils will have learned, for example, to describe people, order food in a restaurant or talk about their house. For the Stamper Trail project, it is up to them to draw on all this knowledge, applying it to the new context of animals around the farm.

But that's not all! We then turned our attention to the Workhouse part of the museum. It was peopled by strange lifesize figures: A girl looking down from on top of a cabinet, a man caught in a bear-trap, a motorcyclist with a hearse for a sidecar. Round these, we built a story so that the pupils could explore the museum, meeting the characters in any order, and build up a picture of what had happened. For each character there was a conversation sheet in French and English. 

The pupils had to use these to collect important information and key words for their glossary. When they had all the clues, they could find a letter, written in French, and interpret it using the key words they had acquired. It led them to the hiding place of the culprit. The drama over a whole afternoon was intense, and many pupils screamed when they opened the door and found him there.

We took groups of pupils to the Museum to complete the Mystery. Including Spanish exchange visitors one year when we had to find an extra day's activities because of a French air traffic control strike.

It was also the start of the idea that was going to turn into the later Street View Mysteries. And other projects at Norwich Castle Museum where pupils created stories and trails around artefacts that caught their attention.

Many many memories of sunny days on the farm (and the time we got cut off from returning to school by a flood), pupils who first came to do the trail in Year 6, then made their own in Year 7, did the mystery in Year 9, did the Spanish exchange in Year 10 and Year 12... Languages and doing things in languages part of their lives and their growing up. A lovely, lovely project to have been part of and which we will do again soon!