Curious Minds

Pupils Tell Tales about a Mummies hand!

On a recent visit to Marsden Community Primary School in Nelson, pupils from class 3F immediately rushed to tell me all about the day when they discovered the severed hand of an Egyptian Mummy in their school grounds.   The hand was safely in a box at the back of the classroom and they were desperate for me to see it, but absolutely wouldn’t touch it themselves.  They had to ask their teacher, Katie Fryer, to show it to me, explaining that anyone who touched it would be cursed.  As Miss Fryer had picked it up when they found it, it didn’t matter if she touched it again – she was already cursed.  The pupils had been working on creating their own individual stories of how they were going to re-unite the hand with the rest of the Mummy in order to lift the curse on poor Miss Fryer.  One pupil had used the three pound budget he had to buy some second hand roller-skates at a car boot sale and described his exhausting trip.  Each pupil had created their own journey and were very keen to tell me them, involving plot lines worthy of the next sequel to Raiders of the Lost Ark.  Each story was littered with their newly acquired knowledge of Egypt.

This is a major achievement for these children.  At Marsden Community Primary, the vast majority of pupils have English as a second language and the teachers are working particularly hard to use creative approaches to help them develop their spoken and written language skills.  Through the Tell Tales project, teachers across the school are working with 7 storytellers and a visual artist to immerse the young people in story and rich language, whilst developing ways the teachers will do this themselves in the future.

Miss Fryer explained ‘They’ve completely bought into it.  I really had to act it out when we found the Mummy’s hand.  I screamed and another teacher had to pretend to calm me down.  The pupils are going home and saying to their parents ‘I’ve been to Egypt today’, not ‘I’ve learned about Egypt today.’  They’re completely immersed.’  She then demonstrated the obvious organic quality of their working partnership by diving straight in to illustrate the tale that storyteller Phil Hillbourne was telling on the board to help the children understand it, only asking for assistance from visual artist Steve Hutton when it came to drawing a goat.

I left the pupils working with Steve to create Egyptian portraits of themselves as heroes holding the objects they had used on their journeys.  Drawings which would commemorate their brave and noble quest to re-unite the Mummy’s hand with its owner, drawings which would remain on the inside of the Mummy’s tomb for all eternity.  Miss Fryer reminded them the direction to write their names in hieroglyphics next to their drawings ‘It’s like when you read the Koran from right to left, and English from left to right.  Egyptian reads from top to bottom.’

And this is just one classroom.  Goodness knows what might be happening in the others!  Exciting stuff.