The teaching activities. Word doc.
The image bank. Powerpoint (2.7M)
These teaching activities for Key Stages 1 and 2 are centred around an image bank of objects and details found in their local area by two children (two invented characters) called Melanie and Omar, who have decided to take photographs of things that they think are beautiful. Their preferences, and all the things that they find, are used as a way to bring the topic of beauty to life and to encourage pupils to express their own ideas about beauty. This leads on to a wide range of teaching possibilities, again using the image bank, and then to activities where the children decide on their own ‘beautiful things’ with a classroom display as the culmination of all this connected work.
Brass doorknob © Lorna Maguire
These materials are designed to be relevant to both Key Stages. The level can be adapted to suit the needs of your class, and most of the activities are of a very open nature. Because of the need to provide a range of ideas that includes upper primary, some of the activities may not be appropriate at Key Stage 1.
The images offer a very wide and varied collection of close-up features and larger shots of buildings, street furniture and other elements of the built environment.
The initial activities involve looking at each picture and discussing what might be beautiful about it. From this work the children should become more familiar with this kind of discussion about beautiful things: both the range of things that people find beautiful and the ways that this beauty can be talked about. The images are accompanied with very simple notes where the character who took the picture gives a short reason for the choice. These ideas can be introduced whenever it seems appropriate (you may want to leave the children free to form their own opinions for longer), and there’s obviously a lot of fun to be had with the class seeing if their ideas match the character’s reasons.
During these discussions we start to get an idea about Melanie’s and Omar’s likes and dislikes, their preferences and so on – we start to see the kinds of things they find beautiful. This means the children may get to the point where they can guess who has taken a particular picture when it comes up for the first time. This involves ideas of the sort: ‘this must be Omar’s because he likes things that are very perfect and neat and shiny,’ or, ‘Omar likes it when things are surprising,’ or, ‘this is Melanie’s because she seems to like very bright colours,’ or, ‘Melanie likes it when things are very old’, and so on. Alongside the notes that accompany each specific image there are some notes suggesting what the characters’ preferences may be, if it’s helpful to introduce some of these possibilities directly.
There are two attachments that you can access here:
Red door © Lorna Maguire
The images that we’ve provided are only one possible way of exploring these activities. You may want to supplement them with your own images, taken in the area around the school and in other places the children are familiar with – and this of course introduces another level of interest and another game of identification. It could also raise more sophisticated possibilities, where the character’s preferences have a geographical bias or in some other way capture additional information about the local area. Another possibility is that children could be asked to take pictures ‘in character’ as Melanie or Omar with the other children guessing who the picture ‘belongs’ to.
Our image bank is exclusively concerned with objects and details found outside – but it could work equally well with beautiful things found inside buildings (found inside the school, for example).
