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I love stories. It’s fantastic to read them and to listen to them being told by others too. There are loads of great stories out there but I wonder, have you ever thought of being someone who makes your own stories?

Today marks fifty days of lockdown in the UK or seven weeks of school closures, a week longer than the usual school summer holidays. In that time, as a creative learning charity, we’ve had to change our modus operandi quite drastically.

The current crisis is taking its toll on everyone. We are all having to learn new ways of coping with the ongoing uncertainty. There are some rules in place but most of us are discovering for ourselves how best to stay safe, cope with isolation, and lay plans for the kind of future we might want when this is all over.

I’ve been talking to children in my local community (at a distance of course!) and using their responses to the question posed in the poem above to write new poems – poems that I hope can open up the possibility for continued conversation even after the current crisis is over. If you are a parent at home or a teacher at school with children right now, why not have a similar conversation with them and see what poetry might come of it?

The first sentence of the UK’s maths curriculum introduces an exciting, dynamic subject – ‘Mathematics is a creative and highly interconnected discipline that has been developed over centuries, providing the solution to some of history’s most intriguing problems’ – yet this inventive subject is largely taught in the classroom with pencil and paper. Artis strongly champions maths being brought to life in a fun and stimulating way through dance, drama and music and shares some inspiration and ideas.

Working alongside more than 120 school children as they dived into the Discover Wellbeing project was a real honour. The project aimed to explore the topic of their mental health and focused upon how this could be further understood through the performing arts. This journey encouraged the children to not only delve deeper into what makes them ‘them’ but also to take pride in the discoveries made.

At Artis we have been pausing for thought and reflecting on the year gone by and all the fantastic achievements we have made as an organisation. This academic year has been another transformational year with incredible stories of children whose communication, confidence and participation has dramatically developed through the ongoing […]

Any new school that I, as an Artis Specialist, work in is a privileged, humbling experience.  Delivering the five week Discover Wellbeing mental wellbeing project was no different, in many ways it was an honour. I delivered the project concurrently in two schools in the West Midlands through drama, music and movement.

The word home does not have to refer to an actual place, the house or flat that you live in. We can use the word home to mean where we feel most happy, most comfortable, most like ourselves.

We’ve collated some general resources which we hope will ensure creativity remains central to children’s learning at home or at school. We will continue to update this page with creative learning resources over the coming weeks.

The Off The Canvas project brings James Webb’s Victorian-era painting of Mont St Michel (c.1868) to life in the Guildhall Art Gallery, but there’s no reason for the explorations to end there!