Year 7 and 8 students from Raroa Normal Intermediate School

All students were highly engaged and achieved quality writing for their character descriptions.

—Lynne Dunn, Teacher, Raroa Normal Intermediate School 

Why did you visit City Gallery?
We run an extension writing programme for gifted and talented students. We wanted to offer them an experience outside the classroom that would inspire some creative writing about characters. Before our visit we used the pre-visit discussion on City Gallery’s Resource Card and asked students to think about what elements of an artwork can allow a writer to ‘enter into’ a character and how mood/tone can be created by an artist.

What did you learn at the Gallery?
Our Gallery Educator led the students through a series of language activities, both oral and written, which encouraged the students to delve deeply into their imagination in order to create a character profile for one of the figurative sculptures they saw in Frances Upritchard’s exhibition. The Gallery Educator’s teaching strategies mirrored the school’s philosophy of collaborative cross-curricular learning.

How did you develop learning after the visit?
After the visit, students chose a character from the exhibition, and created a profile for him/her, choosing a setting in time and in place and placing the character in a situation or action. The students then chose a genre which they used to communicate their character to an audience. Students chose a wide variety of genres: moment in time, eulogy, poem, interview, diary, obituary, journalism.

See examples of the students’ creative writing here