Volunteering with the Learning team

Volunteering with the Learning team

I am a volunteer in the Learning Department at Compton Verney. My duties include helping out shepherding school children around the galleries, checking and restocking the children’s backpacks, cleaning and preparing equipment ready for schools and families, overseeing the tasks which are given to the children and help with the admin side of the department when needed.

back packs 2014

Family Unit stores all the free back packs and trails for children and young people.

I have helped out with many tasks over the last few months, with the forest school by providing support and this was interesting to me as it involved being outside and helping out with the student teachers and learning how to manage schoolchildren with outdoor activities.

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Kasia with students from Northampton University

During the summer I helped out with the families, the task set over the summer period was to encourage children making and observing the Moore-Rodin exhibition and creating their own clay sculpture from what they saw. I got involved by making my own clay sculpture piece of a hand.

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Artspace summer activity making clay body parts for display

Recently, I helped out a small group of year 5 schoolchildren while Culture Street team came to film the children learning all about Compton Verney and what the gallery has to offer. They went into the British Portraits, Northern European, Naples and China Collections. Director Steven Parissien also spoke to the schoolchildren to tell them what his job entails. In the afternoon, the schoolchildren learnt from Learning Programmer Moira Walters on how to paint a Tudor style portrait painting of themselves. The children really were excited and enthusiastic and got stuck into creating their paintings. The filming was going along according to plan. I enjoyed it as this was a different perspective and involved two people outside of Compton Verney to film the piece as part of getting children from schools to go on art trips.
Coming soon. http://www.culturestreet.org.uk/

This week I’ve been helping out with the year 6 who went around the Marx-Lambert, British Folk Art collection and inside the Adam Hall. The children had to investigate the pattern, shape and design. In the afternoon they were using the sketches they had been drawing in the morning from the galleries to incorporate them into their designs for screen printing. The afternoon was fun helping the schoolchildren use the screen print with their designs and watching their excitement as they saw the final results. The children were split into groups where they had to choose the shapes that they had cut-out and choose two colours for the final screen print design.

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Pattern, Shape and Design schools programme for Key Stage 2 with Stratford Preparatory school

The Learning Department get involved and let the volunteers help out in all aspects, so you get a mix of things you will do on the days you help out. You also, help out with schools including children and teachers and families. You may also help students too.

Kasia Synowiec

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Northampton University taking part in Forest schools