May Festival Mayhem!

“Join the Mayhem!” was the call for schools and families to get involved in the University’s new May Festival which ran on campus last week. We were one of the venues involved and we ran a new schools workshop and had a Family Fun workshop on Saturday. It was a busy week!

Both the schools workshop and the Family Fun were based on the Amy Laws letters, which we’ve talked about before (see our posts on the SCA project with St Peter’s Primary School and the Arts Across Learning Festival). The Laws letters feature in the current Wanderlust exhibition in the gallery, so it seemed perfect timing for working with them further.

We had P6/7 from Woodside Primary School visit us for the schools workshop, which was developed from the schools sessions we did earlier this year.  The children used drama and creative writing to re-imagine the Laws family’s life on the mission station in Nyasaland (now Malawi), and to explore the emotions and feelings surrounding Amy’s being sent to live in Edinburgh with an aunt at the age of seven. The children were very interested in seeing the original letters and hearing some of them read aloud, and really got into the character of Amy when it came to writing a letter from Amy to her parents. There was also much hilarity when they enacted the long journey one of the Laws’ letters would have taken from Nyasaland to Edinburgh!

Our “African Animal Attack!” Family Fun session continued on the Laws theme, this time exploring the exciting accounts of wild animal attacks in the letters. The letters are full of them, as the mission station was surrounded by lions, leopards and hyenas. One of the surprising things, reading the letters, is that neither Robert nor Maggie Laws appears to soften the details about these stories for Amy, despite her young age. Their descriptions are sometimes very graphic! I suppose she had grown up in that environment and knew the reality of it, so reading about some of the injuries people incurred from the lion and leopard attacks would not distress her as it might some children.

At Family Fun the children made animal masks, using images of traditional animal masks from various African countries as inspiration. You can see more photos of the masks they made on our Flickr page.

Our next Family Fun is on Saturday June 15th, from 1-4pm, when we’ll be making fantasy maps. As usual it’s a free, drop-in session. Hope to see you there!

Posted by: Sarah

Life Lately

Life in Learning & Outreach lately has been a whirlwind of preparation for the forthcoming Night@Museums and the University’s May Festival. But we’ve also had a lot of classes in finding out about our records on Ancient Egypt …

Who has visited us:

• Insch Primary School P5
• Manor Park Primary School P3 (2 classes)
• Kinellar Primary School P2, P2/3 and P3
• Elrick Primary School P3/4
• Strathburn Primary School P3/4

Medieval Medicine

Yesterday was a day we had been looking forward to: our first “Medieval Medicine” primary schools workshop. We first started thinking about this schools workshop during the Pharmacopoeia exhibition. The exhibition showed some of the Special Collection Centre’s medieval herbals, which illustrate different plants and describe them physically and in terms of their medicinal properties. As well as containing beautiful illustrations of plants, some of the books show the different stages of plant production and give detailed instructions on how to prepare the plants for medicine. There are pictures of people planting, harvesting and even distilling plants, extracting their essence for use as medicine. One of our most exquisite books, the Hortus Sanititatis (Garden of Health), even shows scenes in a medieval hospital with doctors treating patients and analysing urine samples. These books are a gift for delving into the world of medieval medicine.

Our Medieval Medicine workshop gives pupils a chance to see some of these amazing rare books first hand, and turns them into medieval doctors themselves, with patients to heal. Our doctors yesterday were P5 from Insch Primary School in Aberdeenshire. After learning about the system of the Four Humours (the medieval theory of how the human body worked), the children were given patient case notes and “urine” samples, and they got to work diagnosing and curing their patients using a urine and disease charts and a herbal. We had some good discussions going when it came to giving the patients lifestyle advice. One of the patients was a prisoner in a castle dungeon and although the doctors had plenty of good advice for him they weren’t sure he would be able to carry it out. One set of doctors said they would speak to the castle gaolers about improving the living conditions in the prison.

If you’d like to bring your class to the Special Collections Centre for our Medieval Medicine workshop, email us at scc.learning@abdn.ac.uk or phone (01224) 273047 or (01224) 273048.

Life Lately

Life in learning & outreach lately has been very busy with school visits, events and Family Fun. This post gives you a little taster of what’s been going on: 

 
  
   

Who has visited us:

• lots of artists, facilitators and museum/gallery professionals visited us for the Participation, Photography and the Politics of Space Symposium which was developed in collaboration with NEPAN and engage.
• Portlethen Primary School P4/5 – Jacobites: The Rout of Moy workshop
• Fernielea Primary School P5 - Jacobites: The Rout of Moy workshop
• Loriston Primary School P2/3 - Discovering Ancient Egypt
• Culter Primary School P4 - Discovering Ancient Egypt
• Meiklemill Primary School P3 - Discovering Ancient Egypt
• Walker Road Primary School P3A and P3B - Discovering Ancient Egypt
• Buchanhaven Primary School P4A and P4B - Discovering Ancient Egypt
• Charleston School School P3 - Discovering Ancient Egypt

Posted by: Lynsey & Sarah

My Dear Amy…

Last week we had the pleasure of taking part in Aberdeen City Council’s Arts Across Learning (AAL) Festival. The festival encourages venues like us to work with artists (drama, visual art, music and more) to create workshops for Aberdeen schools. This is a fantastic opportunity for us to learn from a specialist and develop our skills for future workshops. This year we worked with drama practitioner Fi Milligan Rennie to bring letters from our archive to life. The letters are from two missionaries, Robert and Maggie Laws, living in Nyasaland (now Malawi) in the late 19th century. After losing several children in Africa they decided to send their sole surviving child, Amy, to live in Scotland for safety. The letters we have are the ones they wrote to her as she grew up far away from them with an aunt in Edinburgh.

We’ve been exploring these letters a lot recently, using them in a project with St Peter’s Primary School, and Fi brought some new ideas for interpreting them through drama. The aim of the workshop was to explore the separation of the Laws family and how the only way they could communicate with each other across continents was by writing letters. What would it have been like to be separated from your parents, not knowing how many years would pass before you could see them again? What would you feel if you couldn’t tell them anything face to face and you knew that even the letters you wrote would take a couple of months to reach them? How would it feel not to be able to hug them when things got bad?

A letter from Robert Laws shows how difficult it was for the parents, as well as Amy:

“Kondowi, January 12^th 1895

My dear Amy,

Do you know I would very much like to take you on my knee this after-noon, and give you a kiss, and have a long talk with you. Both mother and I miss the sight of you very much, but we know that you are cared for by kind loving Aunt Mary and Grandma.”

We tried various methods of interpreting the letters with the four schools who visited us. These methods included:

• Physically separating the class into two sections, Africa and Edinburgh
• Immersive drama to become the characters in the letters
• Building frozen pictures of Amy and her parents’ lives
• Following the journey of a letter from Africa to Edinburgh through drama
• Exploring the thoughts and feelings of Amy and her parents as they wrote and received letters.
• Looking at and listening to the letters themselves

Four classes came to take part in our “My Dear Amy” workshop:

• Kingswells Primary P6/7
• Kingswells Primary P7
• Cornhill Primary P4/5
• St Joseph’s RC School P5

All the classes really entered into the spirit of the workshop and created some amazing pieces of drama.

At the end of their workshop each class wrote letters. The first two classes adopted characters from Africa and Edinburgh and wrote their letters as them. The second day’s classes wrote their letters from Amy to her parents. These letters were then put in envelopes and each pupil will receive a letter from one of their classmates in the post. Here are some examples of the children’s letters. You can see how well they got into character!

1895, Mayfield, Edinburgh
Dear my lovely father! thank you for all your kindness and help. I miss you so very much I wish I was their with you To sit on your Lap and give you a hug and a kiss I wish you could come to Edinburgh to see me but you can’t it’s good when you send me letters I like that but most of all I love you so much I wish we could go to a place and spend time Together we always spent time to gether in malone [Malawi]. And you always so me thats what I liked about malone but know I am in Edinburgh I can’t see you I see you in my dreams but thats all we are spending time in all the dreams I have I wish you could be here with me PS frome your lovely Daghter Amy [letter from Amy Laws to her father Robert]

Dearest Amy, I have missed you. I am so glad that I finally have time to write to you. How are you? With Mary, well that can be an adventure. I hope you were ok at going to school around where Mary lives. I really miss you. My hand has started to shack  [handwriting shaky at this point] as I am not sure of when next I will return. I hope your Aunty mary treats you like the princess you are. You are going to be okay with your Aunty and treat her nicely. I have learnt a lot, as well as teach things, here that I hope to teach you. I miss you lots. Love from Your mummy Margret. Xox [letter from Maggie Laws to her daughter Amy]

We are at our final steps of recovery and I on the other hand am not. I am writing to say Im at my final days as I was bitten by leopard and am now infected. Now don’t worry as my fading soul will go to peace. In your final days please remember me as the man who raised you you furthermore cherish my soul. If you wish to learn more about me ask Narootie a fellow tribesman. Sinsearly, Your brother [letter from a tribesman at the mission station in Nyasaland]

Dear Family, I have prayed for your health and safety every morning and evening! We have got into tragic trouble as a leopard has made some violent attacks – however with the power of the Lord we were able to save 1 man’s life! We are thankfull to those who have came to our Sunday School nevertheless I still miss you dearly! But, I am safe in Gods arms and will always be in his heart, with you. Love you lots, Sister Margey [letter from a missionary in Nyasaland to her family in Scotland]

We are going to develop the workshop further for our workshops for the University’s May Festival. If you are interested in bringing your class to work with the Amy Laws letters, keep a look out for the May Festival brochure which will be available soon.

Posted by: Lynsey and Sarah

Guest Book – Ancient Egyptian explorers!

Over the last few weeks we’ve had lots of visits from schools studying Ancient Egypt, it must be a popular subject this term! We’ve got lots more to come before the Easter holidays but in the last few weeks we’ve had visits from:

• St. Fergus Primary School, P4
• Milltimber Primary School, P4/5
• Balmedie Primary School, two P3 classes
• Portlethen Primary School, P3
• Oyne Primary School, P3/4

While they are here we challenge pupils to become Egyptologists and record what they see on their visit to the SCC. Here are some of the drawings, recording the watercolour drawings of Ancient Egyptian grave markers in our collection.

We also have “squeezes” in our collection, which are pressed paper images of Ancient Egyptian engravings. Pupils use modelling dough to understand how an Egyptologist would squeeze wet paper into an engraving to create a record of how it looked. Wet paper takes too long to dry in our cold, wet climate, we’ve experimented!

Pupils also investigate the world of Ancient Egyptian medicine and the horrid things they mixed together to create them. They get a chance to make up their own recipes, drawing real hieroglyphs on to a recipe sheet.

One pupil decided to adapt the snake hieroglyph to that he could put snake skin in his medicine!

Our last Discovering Ancient Workshop of last week was attended by a very special guest.

Tatty Teddy came to visit with his P3 friends from Oyne Primary School. He is a very well travelled bear, with trips this year including a ski trip, France and now The Sir Duncan Rice Library!

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

Posted by: Lynsey

Travel Journal: St Peter’s RC Primary School

Sarah and I don’t always stay inside the four walls of the lovely Sir Duncan Rice Library. Sometimes we wrap up warm (we are in the north of Scotland after all!) and go out and about. These “Travel Journal” posts will tell you where our learning adventures take us.

This week we were invited to St Peter’s RC Primary School to visit Primary 6 who we worked with in January. You can see the details of the project on their Guest Book post. When they were here at the SCC they explored the letters of the Laws family with us and began to get to know missionaries Robert and Maggie and their daughter Amy. Since then P6 have taken the project further in class and were keen to show us what they had been up to. They created art work using charcoal inspired by the Laws family. Some of the pupils drew some amazing portraits of Amy, which was interesting for Sarah and I to see as we have no photographs to show us what Amy looked like as a child.


Others drew scenes from Amy and her parents lives. 

The Journey of Amelia Laws by Filip

Hawk attacks chickens by Aleks

The parrot dead by Alexander

Amy’s parrot dead by Logan

As well as art work P6 used their creative writing skills to write entries for Amy’s diary and letters from Amy to her parents. Some of the diary entries described Amy’s feelings at being told she would have to leave Nyasaland (now Malawi) to live with her aunt in Edinburgh. The pupils really captured Amy’s feelings of fear and excitement. The letters described what Amy’s life in Edinburgh would have been like including bike rides with Aunt Mary, seeing Edinburgh Castle and experiencing snow for the first time. The pupils read some of the letters and diary entries aloud to us.

It was amazing how the pupils could put themselves in Amy’s shoes so well, especially since we don’t have any of Amy’s letters. It really brought her to life for us. 

We also got the chance to look at the display that P6 had made on their classroom wall about their visits to the SCC. We don’t often get the chance to see the pictures that the class take when they are with us or see what happens once they leave the library so we really enjoyed our trip. Thanks for having us Primary 6!

Posted by: Lynsey

Guest Book – International School of Aberdeen Preschool

On Friday we were visited by lots of young pupils from the International School of Aberdeen’s preschool class. They explored campus using our sculpture map and their very own “I spy…” sheet and visited The Sir Duncan Rice Library. Our current Waterlines exhibition focusses on the sculpture of the same name outside the Library so we used that as our starting point and talked about what a sculpture is. The pupils loved walking around Waterlines and seeing it from all angles. Next we looked at the newest of the University’s outdoor sculptures Evolutionary Loop 517.  We tried to work out what the sculptures were made of, and discussed which ones we liked and why. The classes’ opinion was split on both of the Library’s sculptures but all agreed that Evolutionary Loop 517 was particularly good to touch and climb on!

Next we escaped the cold by visiting the exhibition to see where the artists, Will Maclean and Marian Leven, got their inspiration from. Both were inspired by the sea and ships and so the pupils hunted in the gallery to find references to these.

Once they had had a good look at Will and Marian’s artwork the pupils were set the challenge of creating their very own sculptures for outside of the Library. They used recycled materials such as bottles, coffee stirrers, plastic containers and egg boxes to create amazing pieces of 3D art.
Here are the artists at work:

Before they left us for lunch the pupils finished off with a story in our comfy corner. It was called Little Tug by Stephen Savage and it had a lovely ending to end a very nice morning.

If you would like to bring your pre-school or nursery class to visit The Sir Duncan Rice Library please email us at scc.learning@abdn.ac.uk.

Posted by: Lynsey

Guest Book – the last few weeks

We’ve had lots of schools visiting us over the last few weeks, but with one half of the team being on holiday and the other half leading workshops our Guest Book posts have fallen by the wayside. So now that I have a school-free moment I’d like to make sure all of the lovely classes who have visited get a mention.

Jacobites: The Rout of Moy

This workshop was attended by:

• Fishermoss Primary School, P4/5
• Broomhill Primary School, P5
• Hazlehead Primary School, P6

This workshop allows pupils to bring the Jacobites and Hanoverians to life in our Learning Room. Items from the archives (including a letter written by Charles Edward Stuart) are examined before the class listen to The Rout of Moy, a story inspired by the collection and real historical events. Through games and drama activities the pupils then tell the story themselves. Have a look at some of the pictures from last week’s workshops and see if you can guess what’s going on.

Discovering Ancient Egypt

This workshop was attended by:

• St Cyrus Primary School, P3
• Fishermoss Primary School, P3
• Drumoak Primary School, P3/4
• Glass Primary School, P1-4
• Glass Primary School, P5-7

Another popular workshop looks at Victorian Egyptologists’ records in the Special Collections. Pupils are asked to solve a problem: What would you do if you found an amazing artefact but it was too big to bring home? Oh and you don’t have a digital camera! Our Egyptologists, George Tomlinson and Ellen Pollard, used drawings, squeezes and writing to do this and we look at the original archives to explore their methods before the pupils tested them out for themselves .
Ellen’s notebooks are a fascinating record of the hieroglyphs she saw and translated on her travels around Egypt, including recipes for Ancient Egyptian medicines. The pupils use this as inspiration for their own recipes including some horrid ingredients like snake, ox and blood.
Unfortunately I didn’t manage to catch the rest of the action (the down side of running workshops on your own) but all the classes were great fun to have in the Learning Room. Thanks to Glass Primary Schools’ P1-4 for being our first ever Primary 1′s. We had great fun making recipes together and I hope they use their recipe cards to make even more revolting recipes back at school!

Posted by: Lynsey

Guest Book – St Peter’s RC Primary School and the SCA

Primary 6 from St Peter’s RC Primary School visited us for three afternoons in January as part of a Scottish Council for Archives (SCA) project that we are taking part in. The project will highlight ways in which archives (like us) and schools (like St Peter’s) can work together using the archive collections. Douglas Roberts, who is running the project for the SCA, came all the way up to Aberdeen from Peebles to help us run the project.

Day 1 – This book belongs to…

As Primary 6 had never visited us before we thought we should start with an introduction to what the Special Collections Centre is about. Our This Book Belongs to… workshop was great for this, although we added an extra archive twist so that the pupils could begin to understand what archives are compared to printed books. As always the pupils had a behind the scenes look at where we keep our collections, and made a book plate for their own books.

Primary 6 debating what conditions we keep our books and archives in, before finding out for themselves on their store visit.

Day 2 – Robert and Maggie in Africa

This is when we started really getting into the archives. Through discussion with Douglas and our colleagues at the Special Collections, we had chosen to use a collection of letters which we thought would interest Primary 6 and inspire lots of activities. The letters were written by two 19th-century missionaries at Livingstonia in Malawi, Robert and Maggie Laws, to their young daughter Amelia (or Amy), who lived in Edinburgh with an aunt.
Primary 6 explored the letters and began to build up a picture of what life was like for Robert and Maggie in Malawi (then called Nyasaland). Through reading and acting out extracts from the letters they discovered just how dangerous (and exciting) it would have been for Amy’s parents, and began to understand why they might have have thought it a good idea to send Amy away to live in Edinburgh. From lion attacks to rats in the organ, Primary 6 used their bodies to create fantastic freeze frames of scenes from the mission station.

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As well as animal encounters the Laws’ letters describe their daily life. The pupils used extracts about Robert’s Sunday chores, relationships with the native Ngoni people and events on the mission to create articles, advertisements and images for the “Livingstonia News”. Headlines from this include:

• “Scottish man here to help.”
• “Church can’t hold many people.”
• “Oops Fire!”

Here are some images from the ”Livingstonia News”.
We finished off the workshop by looking at the letters themselves. In groups the pupils examined a letter from Maggie and one from Robert, thinking about how different they were from our letters today. We don’t have any of Amy’s letters and we discussed why that might be. Many answers were suggested, but we suspect that they may have been nibbled by those pesky rats!

Day 3 – Amy in Edinburgh

On day 3 we moved away from Maggie and Robert and travelled all the way over from Africa with Amy to live with her aunt in Edinburgh. The class hadn’t heard much about Amy on Day 2 so we started off by writing up what they did know on a diagram on the wall. Primary 6 came up with facts such as her full name, her age and where she lived. We left the diagram up to be added to later.

Then Primary 6 put themselves in Amy’s shoes and tried to imagine what it was like for her, leaving the mission at the age of seven to live with her aunt in Edinburgh. Some of the pupils had first hand experience of moving to Scotland from other countries, such as Poland and Nigeria. They helped Amy to pack her suitcase, thinking about what was really important for her, such as photograph albums and special toys. They thought about the voyage itself, how long it would have taken and how far away from home she was going. We added these events to a timeline on the wall.

Although we have none of Amy’s own words, we can tell a lot about her life from what her parents wrote in their letters. Using extracts from the letters Primary 6 repeated the freeze frame activity, this time acting out events in Amy’s life. We saw Amy bicycling with her aunts, starting a new school and learning  to milk a cow.
The pupils placed their scenes onto the timeline and added these new facts to the diagram on the wall. Look at the image below to see what other information they got from Robert and Maggie’s letters. As well as factual, ‘external’ information, they gathered a lot of detail about who Amy was as a person and what she might have felt and thought.

Primary 6 then began their hardest task of all. They had to imagine what it was like for Amy, being separated from her parents and really put themselves in her place. They started to think about what Amy might have written in a letter to her parents, and then they wrote it down. They selected the most important line of this letter to share with everybody. Here are some of these lines:

• I really wish you were here with me. Today was my first day at school, at first I was very shy but as I came into the playground other children came to me and were awfully nice to me.
  
• Aunt Mary is very kind to me when I am with her. So kind, in fact, that she bought me a bicicle!
• I started school today the rush of blood circulated in my body I could Feel birds fluttering in my stomach, but the strange thing was I Felt Suddenly at home when I Settled in dissapeared into the crowd

• I was really sad to move away from you and Dad. But writing these letters are keeping me going.

• Today [my friend] Elizabeth was killed in a car accident we went to the scene but they wouldn’t let us past a certain point. I wish I could of said goodbye. I feel so sorry for her Parents I wish I could see them but Aunt Mary said they need time by themselves.
• I was shocked when I found out that the parrot had died I was griev struck!

We were very impressed by the lovely letters that Primary 6 wrote to Robert and Maggie. Douglas is going to write a report about our project and we hope that other archives will feel inspired by it to try using some of their collection in a similar way. Primary 6 are back in school now and hopefully they are carrying on with the Laws theme in the classroom. Thanks for coming in and helping us to explore the letters Primary 6! Look out for more from the Laws family in future workshops and Family Fun events.

Posted by: Lynsey & Sarah