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Gertrude Bell

Exhibition title: Gertrude Bell

School: Lealholm Primary School, KS2

Topic/theme: History – a non-European society that provides contrast with British history – one study chosen from early Islamic civilisation, including a study of Baghdad c. AD 900. Gertrude Bell links through the work she carried out in Baghdad

Curriculum areas covered: History, English, Maths, Geography, Computing, Design and Technology

What we did to find out about our topic and create our exhibition: We visited Kirkleatham Museum because they had an exhibition about Gertrude Bell. This allowed us to learn more about her. Then at school, we did some work about the features that were included in the exhibition. From this, we were able to decide what we wanted to include in our own exhibition and the resources that we needed. As Gertrude Bell’s grandfather and father were involved in Ironstone mining, we visited the Ironstone Mining Museum. There we were able to look at artefacts, we did some work on inferring from pictures and we gathered more information for our exhibition.

Our exhibition included:

  • Gertrude Bell’s family tree
  • Information about, and models of, Red Barns
  • A map of the different places that Gertrude Bell travelled to
  • Artefacts from the time – with students labels explaining their purpose and use
  • Green screen – people had the opportunity to visit Red Barns
  • We had copies of her diary entries from her travels and the students explained them to our visitors

    • How our students benefited from taking this approach:

  • Creating an exhibition enabled us to cover a lot of curriculum areas
  • Something different for the children to get involved with
  • Student led – they really enjoyed showing their work to their parents and the community
  • Enabled students to learn a lot of information and gain many new skills. They were also able to explain all the different aspects of the exhibition to visitors, demonstrating that the learning was embedded

    • How I used the toolkit: I used the toolkit to gather images and information. It was very comprehensive and helped to generate the ideas for the exhibition that we were creating in class.

    Top tips for other teachers: Developing an exhibition is a good opportunity for independent learning and problem solving. Allow students to lead the exhibition development as much as possible, with just a small amount of teacher input. I felt the children in the class engaged well with it and it was mainly their ideas (with a little steer in the right direction from me). They really enjoyed it and it was great to see the final product.

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