28/01/2004 Visit to the Centre

Today it has been carried out one of the weekly visits to the centre collaborating with MOTFAL project. An outing scheduled for today had to be called off because of bad weather.

On the current day, the first one after Christmas time, the centre´s director intended to go on excursion with the pupils. Finally, it had to be cancelled due to bad weather.

The outing aimed to visit one of caves situated in the area surrounding the centre in order to analyse and make a deeper study of the topic currently being covered: Prehistory, including in the subject called Knowledge of the Environment.

For a long time, a native boy has been in charge of cataloguing all the cave paintings found in the area. The centre will be celebrating in his honour. The pupils will be collaborating with this tribute by arranging an exhibition of painting material replicas such as: hand-made paint brushes using animal´s fur, plants and sticks. The exhibition will also include paintings made in the same way as in the past, using materials collected from nature such as coal, for making the black colour and sand for brown. All these materials are mixed up with lard in order to obtain more consistency and be able to work with them more easily.

Using all these materials, the pupils will make a replica of the paintings existing in the Cave of the Swallow, which should have been visited today as Prehistoric men and women did in the past. On the homage day, it is planned to cover the centre´s walls with the works undertaken and the materials prepared by the pupils themselves for the exhibition.

Before this final stage, several sessions are held in order to study Prehistory and make students get in contact with it.

Today´s session, aimed to visit the cave in order to make drawings and take photographs of it. Later on, by using the pen drive the images will be transferred to the computer. Then, the students and the teacher will reach a consensus on which are the best ones for the work groups to make the cave paintings replicas.

Today a new idea has arisen. If the students find any sylex stone (some students have already volunteered to fetch them) they themselves will make Palaeolithic tools and devices for the exhibition.

The morning session has ended checking the plant files that have been made up to now.
An example of all the plants classified so far can be found in the BSWC.

NEXT MEETING

On next 27th and 28th January another MOTFAL MEETING will be held in the city of Brussels.

This time, we will deal with all those issues not covered in previous meetings due to the absence of some of the people involved and other different reasons. The draft agenda can be consulted if you click here. Later on, the report of this meeting will be uploaded in this Web Log.