Display Pieces

We have really upped our topic based work this week, for our topic [Durham]. We had a lesson on St Cuthbert and the journey his body made, carried by the monks, to escape the invading Vikings. One aspect of the lesson was to create A3 collages of the key parts of our story. Below are some. 

The latter cow was the first one created. The girls involved started off well, with brown tissue paper for the dun cow. I went to help another group and they did that lol! I think it is quite pretty actually. It reminds me of the painted 3D sculptures of cows that were dotted all around Manchester a few years back. And, it reminds me of the story of the patchwork elephant. But, for our history/geography display, it doesn't really work. 

So, I had to get strict and give them only a few colours - rather than letting them collect their own from a table of resources - and now the result is a little more accurate lol. It is a little sad, definitely - so much brown! But, we have coloured land maps the children have done, posters, photographs and these great binocular pictures - where the children drew what they could see looking through binoculars towards Durham lol. So, there will be lots of colour. And, we've got some captions - the children wrote them and typed them up - to explain these collages, to ensure they make sense lol.

The display should end up pretty good. We already have a huge painting of St Cuthbert on one wall, with questions all around it that the children have asked/want to find out. Some of their questions were quite intellectual lol - 'why did he believe in God?'; 'why did the monks want to save his body from the Vikings?' etc. Some were just really funny lol - 'did he sleep in bunk beds?' lol... We also have a huge photograph of Durham Cathedral and some of the surrounding buildings. It must be 7 foot long! The TA - who is amazing when it comes to display pieces - has three copies, each smaller than the last. She is going to decoupage it, so that it has a 3D effort/looks like it is coming out of the wall. It should be really high impact. Exciting times! :D