Creative Ardagh

One of the reasons that this blog has been so quiet is that I've been busy with a new venture. In August myself and my cousin got the opportunity to open a new business. The heritage centre in Ardagh, Co. Longford was opened in the 90s in the old school building where I spent part of my Junior Infants year. It subsequently closed and reopened briefly as a restaurant but has been empty for a long time. My mother and my grandfather both taught in the building. The history and heritage of the area, which stretches from ancient mythology, through saints and scholars and famine times to national tidy towns success, formed the basis of many of my own projects in college. Bringing this to life for a wide audience through art has been one of my ambitions for many years and when the chance to take over the building arose during the summer I jumped at it. At the moment we are running creative programmes for children and adults and hope to expand to include arts-based heritage programmes for schools in the near future. You can find out more about what we have done so far at Ardagh Heritage and Creativity Centre and our plans for the future at www.creativeardagh.com

It's been awhile ...

I'm not sure how many people were following this blog, but I'm sure any who were thought I had given up by now. I can't believe how long it has been since I've updated it. I have been continuing to work on the project all the time and posts will be much more frequent from now on.
I finished the pilot project in Glen before Easter and made a return visit to the school in June. I was delighted to find out the most of the pupils were still using their journals as they got ready to leave primary and start secondary school in September. I hope they have all settled in well by now and thank them again for the effort they put in to their Identity books.
I'm posting video clips of three contrasting finished books here now. All of the rest of them were equally unique as they each approached the project in very different ways.
The first example chose to take an abstract approach to the book, creating it from a single sheet, with lots of different art techniques and colour, but no recognisable pictures. The second is more traditional in style and mixes image and text in a basic but effective way, while the third is mainly image based using humour and a variety of illustration techniques to get its message across. The audio is from the final evaluation which I videoed. We had done a trail run before which actually worked much better than this version as the class had not seen each others' books in full before and asked much more interesting and deeper questions and gave fuller explanations of their own work. If anyone would like to see more samples just email and let me know.
I have completed a scheme booklet which includes lesson plans, resource lists and curriculum objectives and comes with a few video clips to allow teachers to carry out the project with their own fifth and sixth classes. I will post some sample pages later and if anyone would like a full version of the document I will email it or post a copy on if you send me your details to corkeryannette@eircom.net