This year FMS has become a partner school with Poole Lighthouse. We are only one of nine schools to receive this honour.
This gives the school a unique opportunity to work on a variety of exciting projects with Lighthouse and their partners over the school year.
In November a group of year 8 pupils attended Othello. After the show they were interviewed by the Lighthouse and representatives of the theatre company to create a blog and critique of the play for social media and to provide feedback for the Theatre Company.
The Merchandise stand, designed and made by pupils from FMS last year, was refurbished and adapted and will be used from the middle of November to promote and advertise this year’s pantomime at Lighthouse. It will then go back to it’s ‘day job’ as the Merchandise Stand over the Christmas Pantomime season.
It is Lighthouse’s 40th Anniversary this year and 17 pupils from year 7 and 8 have been involved in a project commissioned by Lighthouse to commemorate this event. We also approached Arts University Bournemouth to help us with this commission and have secured the services of five final year illustration students.
The brief is to create an exhibition illustrating some of the key events from it’s 40 year history. Lighthouse provided us with scrapbooks of memorabilia, artefacts, news stories and events the students chose an event and have illustrated this.
A project like this would certainly benefit from the services of a professional illustrator and we had the amazing opportunity to work with Martin Brown. Martin has been the illustrator for the ‘Horrible Histories’ books for the past 25 years, he is also a writer and cartoonist, and joined us at school for the day. He gave our students and the students from AUB a drawing masterclass and then spent the day inspiring, helping, advising and sharing his talent of bring history alive through his illustrations and cartoons with the pupils.
This day was followed up with a visit to the Arts University where the pupils completed their artwork and illustrations. Martin also joined us at the University where the pupils worked alongside the undergraduate students to create some excellent work. The results can be seen at Poole Lighthouse from early December until February 2019.
The pupils were a credit to the school and Martin wrote a complement slip describing them as
“Talented, motivated and fun students who made me feel totally welcome”.
And “I had a BRILLIANT day”.
