Citizenship

  • Portraiture can be used to develop confidence and responsibility through creating a self-portrait to recognise their worth as individuals
  • Looking at relationships and people from the past in portraiture can assist with developing good relationships, particularly with regard to thinking about the lives of people living in other places and times and being aware of different types of relationship.

 

Literacy

  • Workshops around portraits of authors can assist with the National Literacy Strategy in the areas of biography and of poetry and prose by eminent authors.
  • A workshop facilitating creative writing about the real and imagined lives of people portrayed can also assist the National Literacy Strategy.

 

Blank patches on Thomas Gainsborough's Byam Family offer the challenge for children at Key Stage 2 of colour-mixing as part of a workshop on light and conservation © The Holburne Museum of Art

Blank patches on Thomas Gainsborough’s Byam Family offer the challenge for children at Key Stage 2 of colour-mixing as part of a workshop on light and conservation
© The Holburne Museum of Art

Science

  • Portraits can look at how natural fabrics, such as wool, silk and linen, and different textiles are represented and how paint and different colours are made.
  • Portraits can be used to illustrate use of science in the world of art through environmental conditions, the effects of light and different materials.

 

A good example: Colour and Light: A Conservation Conundrum
The Holburne Museum of Art in Bath runs an interactive KS2 workshop that introduces children to museum conservation and looks at the role of science in the world of art. Paintings, artefacts and the actual galleries are used to look at the environmental conditions (light, temperature and humidity) needed to conserve paintings and how colour mixing is used as a technique in conserving paintings.

 

Pupils discuss and analyse the galleries, observe and draw objects and paintings, take part in experiments using light and look at the effects of light and heat on objects. They also colour-mix paint to conserve and match paint to copies of paintings in the collection.

 

 

Return to ‘Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2’