Guest book – Kemnay Primary School

Our last school visit for this year! I can hardly believe that nearly five months have gone by since we started our schools learning programme. It’s been a wonderful journey for us since it started, when we fitted out the Learning Room and planned our first workshops. And it’s been a real pleasure to welcome so many school groups to the Special Collections Centre. We hope to have many more visits in 2012-2013!

Our final workshop for the year was with Kemnay Primary School P3, who came to the University to discover all about our archives on Ancient Egyptians. After an action-packed morning at King’s Museum learning about mummification, they came up to the Library and discovered how the Victorian archaeologists had recorded the amazing artefacts they found in Egypt. At a time when there were hardly any cameras and it was difficult to bring large objects home, how did you make an accurate record of your discoveries?

The children explored different techniques for recording stone engravings, and turned their hands to drawing close observational sketches of a beautiful painting of an Egyptian sarcophagus. Then they reinterpreted a notebook filled with translations of hieroglyph recipes for Ancient Egyptian medicines – the pupils made up their own recipes using the Egyptian ingredients and acted out advertisements for them to the rest of the class!

Posted by: Sarah

Set for Summer

Summer is a-coming in, and the school holidays are nearly upon us. Whether you spend them at home or away, how better to record your summer holiday adventures than by keeping your memories in a journal?

We have some great journals and scrapbooks in the archive collections, and they provided lots of inspiration for our Family Fun day on Saturday. The participants made their very own journals to take away and learned real bookbinding skills, sewing the pages to the binding using waxed thread. They also designed and made book plates to stick in the inside covers of their journals.

Check out the photos of the event below:

Participants of all ages used real bookbinding skills to make their journals.

The finished product – an elegant journal with a coloured, beaded tie.

The participants designed, inked and stamped their own book plates.

Inking up the book plates took quite a lot of effort!

And here are some pictures of some of the scrapbooks and journals in our collection:

The image above is from the notebook of David Cardno. Born in Peterhead in 1853, he worked on whaling ships when he was only a young boy. He travelled to many areas of the Arctic and he became very interested in the Innuit customs and way of life. The page above shows a sketch of an igloo. This notebook is full of written descriptions interspersed with drawings. He also recorded Innuit words and translated them into English.

Below are some pages from the Countess of Kintore’s scrapbook. She loved to record the lives and careers of her children and husband, and her scrapbook is a great example of how you can use mixed media to record events in a journal. She pasted in envelopes with letters and locks of hair, postcards, newspaper cuttings, leaves and flowers and even an embroidered picture by one of her children. The family moved to South Australia in the late 1800s when the Earl of Kintore became Governor-General, so the scrapbook also has elements of a travel journal.

Why don’t you come along to our next Family Fun event? We will be holding free events for children and families every Wednesday afternoon from 1-4pm during the holidays.

Look out for our ‘how to’ on making a journal, coming soon.

Posted by: Sarah and Lynsey

Guest Book – Muirfield Primary School

In our last post we promised to take you through the stages of our workshop “This Book Belongs To …” when we had another class in.  Well today we had P6/7 visit us from Muir field Primary School.

When a class comes to visit the first impression will be a big wow, as they enter the front door and look up into the atrium. The interior of the library is so unexpected as it makes such a big contrast to the cube exterior.

Once through the security barriers the class makes their way downstairs to the  Learning Room, where they are introduced to the workshop and learn a bit about what goes on in the Special Collections Centre. We’ll show you that in the next post.

If you would like to bring your class to do a workshop at the Special Collections Centre, email scc.learning@abdn.ac.uk or phone (01224) 273047 or (01224) 273048.

Posted by: Lynsey and Sarah

Guest book – St Comb’s Primary School

Here are some photos of yesterday’s visit by St Comb’s Primary School.  They were here to do our most popular workshop to date, “This Book Belongs To …”, in which the pupils learn about rare books and how we look after them. The visit incorporates a visit to one of the Special Collections stores, and a craft activity in which the pupils get to make their own book plates based on some of the book plates in our collections.

In future posts we’ll take you through the workshop stage by stage; in the meantime here are some snapshots of St Comb’s P6/7 visit.

If you would like to bring your class to do this workshop, email us at scc.learning@abdn.ac.uk or phone us at (01224) 273047 or (01224) 273048.

Posted by: Sarah and Lynsey