Work experience

Hello my name is Murray and I have just completed my work experience with the East lothian council museum service, which I have thoroughly enjoyed and believe has been of great use to me. As the title suggests work experience is when a school pupil ventures out into the adult world for a week in my case, to gain an insight into a prospective career path perhaps or simply to understand greater their strengths and weaknesses in relation to which job they are best to adopt in the future. I remain uncertain about my future occupation, however realise I have a great interest in both art and history two broad subjects which relate to this job and so regardless or whether or not it was for me I would understand greater what suits me.

At the begining of the week admitedly I felt somewhat anxious about going into unfamiliar surroundings as I am not the most adept to change. However from the outset I felt at home after meeting Sarah ansd the rest of the staff, followed by a tour of the museum. The first day I spent at Musselburgh Museum, strangely despite living near I had never actually noticed it. That day there was two school visits arranged in order to teach them about royalty, and so I had to ensure after the initial talk by Mr Fairnie that every young pupil had a quiz sheet and then went around the museum helping them find the answers. I found this task paricularly enjoyable and rewarding as I had obviously been through that stage of education in my earlier years, experiencing similiar scenarios and so felt I could relate to them well and obviously tried to help where I could. 

Then the following days my time was spent in Haddington museum, with one more brief tour of Musselburgh museum with the primary children. This museum was far larger with rooms packed with old artefacts of great interest. After being introduced to the building and Sarah’s lovely colleagues, my first task was to create a Roman helmet an opportunity I relished as being an art pupil I felt I could contribute with my creativity. Following this I was set the task of discovering the history behind an old milk bottle a woman found in her garden and handed into the museum, intrigued to know its origin.  My third day with the museum service entailed going to Musselburgh museum in the morning for one final tour with the children from Campie, primary 6. Then in the afternoon I returned to Haddington with Sarah where I helped to wrap up large landscape paintings for transportation to a new exhibition opening down the road, followed by sorting out loan boxes which had recently been returned from schools. One thing in particular I liked about this work experience is there are many old items of historical value which you get to deal with and also there appears to be many different features of the job meaning you are not doing the same tedious thing all the time.

On thursday my last full day with the museum I created contact lists to send leaflets and ask for various companies to advertise the museum, for example local primary schools who may be interested to come visit or need help with workshops. After that  task I sent away bundles of leaflets to the local primary classes who had recently visited the Royal exhibition in Musselburgh saying thank you and welcoming them to return soon. Then in the afternoon after my lunch break, I went out to Haddington infant school(primary 1-3) with Sarah to watch their show celebrating their final days in the school and the immenent step up to the older primary, visiting the John Gray centre briefly en route. The show was very good for children so young with some funny bits which stick in my mind and following it Sarah handed all the children leaving a certificate of merit for their time at the school.

Posted in Education | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Welcome to Festival of Museums weekend!

You join us at a rather tense moment, those few hours before our programme of events kicks off across the weekend. I really hope this weather won’t put people off coming out to join us for Festival of Museums!

Festival of Museums is a weekend dedicated to putting on lovely, exciting events across museums in Scotland. So with us, we decided to go down the route of campaigners from East Lothian’s past. Tonight we have Elsie Inglis and Catherine Blair appearing in the John Gray Centre to tell visitors about their lives, and to take them on a Suffragette march. We had a great time a few weeks ago doing a photoshoot to promote the event. It was the day after the Council elections and one man, seeing us posing in the street with our Votes for Women sign, shouted “Typical women, always late, elections were yesterday!”. Ahh, you can’t beat a bit of public interaction!

On Saturday it’s the turn of our museums in Dunbar as John Muir and Black Agnes both get visitors involved in their campaigns. As you’ll probably know, John Muir campaigned on environmental issues, long before it was popular. Black Agnes defended Dunbar Castle without her husband there, a rare achievement for a woman in the 1300s! I particularly can’t wait to see Black Agnes in the Town House, as there will also be a ‘ghost’ played by a storyteller who is out to get Black Agnes, and may surprise a few visitors by using some of the hidden stairwells in the building.

Then on Sunday, we head west, as Musselburgh and Prestongrange museums both host different characters. At Prestongrange, two miners will be on hand to talk visitors through their lives and encourage them to come on strike with them. I dropped off a tin bath yesterday to Prestongrange and you’ll need to come along to find out what that’s all about! Our two fantastic work experience students Jenna and Renata have also come up with some miners games which will let children test out if they have mining skills. In Musselburgh, it’s an exciting time as the new exhibition on Musselburgh’s Royal connections opens on Sunday, at the same time as two of Mary Queen of Scots’ maids pop up to give us the gossip on the most famous beheaded Queen of all time! Having met the maids before, I actually can’t wait to hear them again – very funny and very argumentative!

Download the leaflet here incase you fancy coming along! All events are free.

Posted in Events | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Opening Day at the John Gray Centre

 

Primary school visitors at the John Gray Centre Primary school visitors at the John Gray Centre

Well, we are now – at long last! – actually open! We had an excellent and truly enjoyable day on Friday, which kicked off with 90 (yes, 90!) children from King’s Meadow Primary School, St Mary’s Primary School, Ross High and Children 1st bursting in (in a calm and orderly manner, of course!) to explore the museum and see our first temporary exhibition, ‘Our Place in Time’ –which features their own work. Have a look at some of their handwritten comments on our Facebook page. 

Opening Day postcard - King's Meadow Primary Message from one of our first visitors!

We also had visitors from CHANGES community group and other schools in East Lothian, who had also contributed to the exhibition – and hopefully more will come over the school holidays, with their parents and friends. You can find out more about the projects they did, which are showcased in ‘Our Place in Time’, on our School and Community pages. 

Later in the day we had a full-to-bursting Civic Reception, which led to even more visitors coming up to tour the exhibitions and explore the Archives and Local History Centre. They all seemed to enjoy it, which was great. Thank you to those who came to the ‘website workshops’ I’ve been doing around the county over the last few weeks, who came along too! 

The week leading up to opening day was pretty amazing, as we rushed around putting the finishing touches to the museum exhibition, setting up ‘Our Place in Time’, finalising the shelving and books in the Local History Centre, learning how to set and unset the alarm, establishing ‘procedures’ and generally getting ready. It was a week of long days, but so exciting to see the museum grow from a silent shell, littered with hammers, screwdrivers, unopened boxes of precious artefacts, and mysterious widgets and plastic frames into the modern, beautiful, fascinating and informative gallery it is now (even if I do say so – it wasn’t me who did it, it was the main museum team!) Have a look at our video on YouTube to see Claire Pannell, our Collections Officer, explaining the start of the process.

We’ll soon have a new video showing the highlights from Opening Day on our YouTube channel, so keep an eye open for it.

Now we need to get the word out to make sure everyone realises we’re fully open to the public – seven days a week! Check out our opening hours. Don’t forget we also have free wi-fi in the Centre (you just need your East Lothian library card and pin to log in), as well as bookable computers in the computer room and the library. Help us spread the word!

Posted in Management | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

And now we are FIVE!

Well, as of this Friday we will have 5 venues open! How exciting!! As you can imagine this week has been absolutely manic trying to get everything ready for the opening of Dunbar Town House Museum and Gallery and the John Gray Centre.

Just to give you some idea of the randomness of it all, on Monday we laminated everything in sight at Prestongrange with our new laminator, on Tuesday I got glue and sand all over myself as we installed an interactive in the John Gray Centre and today I’m about to head to Dunbar Primary to pick up things from all their P2 classes to display in Dunbar Town House! Things on my to do list include: make up goody bags for first visitor to the John Gray Centre, buy some extra dolls for our Dunbar Town House dolls house, and leave some chocolate eggs at Prestongrange Museum for our Eggsplore Museums event over Easter. Phew!

So just to remind you if you want to come along:

Prestongrange Museum reopens on Sunday 1st April. It’s open 7 days a week from 1st April til 31st October from 11.30am-4.30pm. New signage is going up around the site as we speak, plus we’re having bits repainted and there are a few new ramps and paths too!

John Gray Centre fully opens on Friday 30th March at 10am. Opening times for the centre can be found on the website. For a little sneak preview, check out our video on YouTube. Can’t wait for everyone to see inside, it’s looking great!!

Dunbar Town House Museum and Gallery opens on Sunday 1st April. It’s open 7 days a week from 1st April to 31st October from 1pm-5pm. Dunbar in Living Memory, the first exhibition, has been set up and looks really interesting.

Plus we also have Musselburgh Museum and John  Muir’s Birthplace which open all year round, and have changing exhibitions.

To check out what’s going on across all our venues this year, you can download our What’s On brochure for 2012!

Now, I’m off to tackle that to do list…Hope to see you soon!

Posted in Events, John Gray Centre | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Festival Of Museums Summer of fun…

Hi Everyone, I’m Jenna, I have just joined the East Lothian museum team doing work experience as part of an Event Management college course. I am pretty new to ‘blogging’ so please bear with me.

So far today during my first day on the job… I have met lots of friendly faces (they have names I just cant remember yet!). I have been helping out with finding advertising ideas for our upcoming Festival of Museums and helping with the latest East Lothian Museum Service What’s on Guide. I have been to visit the John Gray Centre in Haddington which opens March 30th 2012 and I have to say it looks Amazing, a really big well done to all those involved in making it look so good and to be honest the toys and games to teach people how things were back in the day are great fun too! It really is a historic site which can be enjoyed by the local community no matter how young or old. I cannot wait until it is officially open to visit again! And this is all on my first day!

It really is shaping up to be a fun filled summer… stay tuned to this blog and I’ll keep you up to date and in the know with the Events and everything else going on in the world of East Lothian Museum services.

Posted in Management | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

New Museums on the horizon

15 days to go until the John Gray Centre fully opens! I’ve been working on the Centre since I first joined the Council 4 years ago, and at that point there were plans, lots of ideas and lots of work to be done. Now we’re almost ready to open it feels like these final few weeks are flying by. We’ve had a few final teething problems – our feely seaweed keeps breaking up so we’re now replacing it with fake seaweed for example. But overall it’s looking pretty good and I’m really excited about the first visitors getting in to see it all. You can check out a film of the library within the Centre opening last week on our YouTube  site. It opens on 30th March at 10am, so come along and be one of the first upstairs, or wait until the weekend to get inside for a glimpse. Opening hours are available on the John Gray Centre website.

We also have Dunbar Town House Museum and Gallery reopening, as well as Prestongrange reopening for the new season on 1st April. Dunbar Town House will have an exhibition called ‘Dunbar in Living Memory’ which includes topics like the new school in Dunbar, how housing has changed, what people did in their spare time in the past and lots of memories from Dunbar people. There is also going to be a dolls house replica of the building, charting its history, made by members of the Craft Clinic from the Fisherrow Centre. You can check out photos on our Facebook page.

Prestongrange Museum reopens on 1st April too and we have a few new additions our visitors might see. The wall outside the Visitor Centre has been rebuilt, and work to restore the Hoffman Kiln is underway. Two new ramps have been installed across the train tracks at the east end of the site to allow better access for everyone. New signage is going to be installed in the next few weeks so do keep a look out for it if you’re driving along the coast road between Prestonpans and Musselburgh. The exhibition at Prestongrange this year is going to focus on the end of industry at Prestongrange as this year is 50 years since the colliery closed on site.

Remember of course that John Muir’s Birthplace is open all year round. Their new exhibition ‘Gude Fecher – John Muir the Campaigner’ opens on 28th March so do pop in to find out more about the lovely man himself!

So, hopefully that’s enough to tempt you along for a little visit! Check out our upcoming events on our website. Our What’s On booklet is due out on 30th March so pick up a copy from any of our museums to find out what’s in store for the year ahead! You can also follow us on Twitter – @ELMuseumService.

Hope to see you soon!

Posted in Events, Exhibitions, John Gray Centre | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

CPD Share: Using Archaeology in the Classroom

Yesterday evening (22nd Feb) I went along to a fab CPD session in Haddington Town Hall co-hosted by Catherine Knops of Archaeology Scotland (AS) and our very own Education Officer, Sarah Cowie. The session was all about introducing local primary teaching staff to archaeology, and exploring some of the infinite number of ways it can be used to support learning across the curriculum.

On first impressions, archaeology might not seem like an obvious resource for teachers, however, the two-hour session demonstrated that there is much more to archaeology than digging! In fact, excavating is actually only a small area of activity with this wide-ranging subject. History, geography, science and technology, maths, expressive arts and even health and wellbeing, can all be actively brought to life through hands-on learning using not only archaeological artefacts, but also archaeological techniques, such as map reading, surveying and scaled drawing, as well as associated skills, such as problem solving and team work etc.

After hearing from Catherine about what archaeology has to offer, teachers got a chance to try their hand at some surveying (much harder than it looks!), as well as have good rummage through the themed ‘Investigation Kits’ which AS loans out to schools for up to two weeks. These kits contain a fantastic array of real and reproduction artefacts associated with particular themes (e.g. Vikings, Romans, Celts), along with handy teaching materials and loads of ideas for activities inside and outside the classroom.

The feedback from teachers was all really positive and reflected just how flexible archaeology is as a resource. For instance, the Roman Inspection Kit was of great interest to a Latin teacher, who thought it could really help bring the language to life for her class; while a careers teacher was interested in getting an AS archaeologist to come and speak to children about the profession and possible career paths. One teacher was even keen to devote an entire topic to archaeology: “The kids would love it. I think it would be great!”

It was also really useful to hear from Sarah about the East Lothian Historic Environment Record, which is now up and running online, allowing anyone to search and locate sites of historical or archaeological interest throughout the borough – a perfect resource for teachers wishing to incorporate local history and landmarks into their lessons.

All in all it was a great evening, everyone seemed really enthusiastic about taking away what they had learned and using it in the classroom, and it was also great to see such a good turn out – perhaps word had gotten out about the superior spread of refreshments on offer… I was particularly impressed by the fairy cakes, not to mention the Archaeology Scotland rock (!) With tasty treats like that, any future CPD events hosted by Sarah and Catherine look set to be fully booked.

Posted in Education | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Rhino Horns, Bronze Sculptures and Security Guards

I know I usually write about what we’ve been up to here in East Lothian, but this week some stories from around the UK caught my attention and I thought you might be interested in to read about them!

This week there have been two big stories about people trying to steal things from museums.  

First of all, at Kelvingrove Museum in Glasgow, on Sunday afternoon someone took one of their bronze sculptures. It wasn’t huge so someone could have carried it out without it being noticed. Bronze is valuable so they must have wanted to sell it on to make money. But thanks to a tip off from a member of the public, they’ve been able to find it again!

You can read and watch what happened here, then you can read how the Police recovered it here!

The other story this week came from Norwich Castle, where a group of robbers tried to take Rhino horns from the museum! Rhino horns are very valuable and in the past year, there have been at least 20 robberies from museums across Europe. You can read more about this here. Museums are now being advised to replace their real Rhino horns on display with fake ones. In Norwich Castle, the real ones were still on display and the thieves smashed the case and managed to get them out. Luckily, one of the staff managed to trip up the thieves who fell over and dropped the Rhino horn. The staff were able to get it back and the thieves ran off to their get away car. Phew! You can read all about the dramatic story here.

So a very dramatic week for museums!

Posted in Collections | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

A visit to the Highlands!

On Monday I spoke at an event in Inverness about museums working with schools. The event was for museums and visitor centres from across the Highlands and Moray areas. I was speaking about our classroom museum programme we deliver with schools. It was a really interesting day and I got to speak to people from lots of different museums, archives, visitor attractions and centres from across the whole area. I’m now intrigued to visit places like the Scottish Dolphin Centre, Highland Museum of Childhood and Knockando Woolmill!

It was interesting to hear that many of those attending struggle with some of the same issues as we do – how to get schools to visit them, how to find out which topics schools are focussing on, what is the best way to get children to interact with objects and the places they visit. There were also lots of positive thoughts as well – stories of venues who had changed what they offer and how this had impacted on their school visits. I was also really impressed with the booklet the Highland Museums Forum had put together which included details of what all museums across the area provided for schools, from visits to loan boxes.

We also got a chance to look round Culloden, which tells the story of the battle in 1746. The Visitor Centre includes the story of the build up to Culloden so it was interesting to read about our local Jacobite link – the Battle of Prestonpans. There was also a fantastic film which put you right in the centre of the battle with sound and film all around you – I was in there myself and it was quite scary! I didn’t get a chance to walk the battlefield – it was a bit too windy and there was so much else to do on the day. I would definitely recommend a visit (and I might make it back there too pretty soon myself!).

Posted in Education | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

A week of Chariots and Victorians!

Last week, I spent Monday and Tuesday in Dunbar Primary (John Muir Campus) visiting all the Primary 2 classes to help them make a museum. I started by talking to them all in a huge assembly, then I went round all the classes so we could have a go at examining some objects. Some of my favourite Victorian objects the classes looked at were a washboard, carpet beater and old fashioned iron. You can see we had lots of fun!

Then on Thursday, I went with Musselburgh Burgh’s P3/4 and P4/5 to visit Jewel and Esk College where we collected the wooden Roman Chariots they’d made from the classes’ designs. We then went to Prestongrange Museum where we painted the chariots. They are drying off at the moment, then after the holiday we’ll take them along to the school and put them together. I can’t wait to see them! You might remember the class visited the Romans exhibition at Musselburgh Museum to give them some help in learning about the Romans. If you’re looking for something to do this February holiday, remember the museum is open Thursday-Saturday 10am-3.30pm and there are lots of lovely Roman things to see and do there! And, best of all, it’s free!

This week, while the schools are off, I’m going to catch up on planning all our events for the year ahead in our museums. Our What’s On booklet is due to come back from the designers this week so not long now til it’s launched!

Just to remind you all that we’re opening 2 new museums this year – John Gray Centre in Haddington and Dunbar Town House. Prestongrange Museum will also reopen for the new season on 1st April, whilst John Muir’s Birthplace and Musselburgh remain open year round. Hope to see you soon!

Posted in Education, Events, John Gray Centre | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment