Simon Hollingworth highlights some of his top entries from our Hub, our one-stop-shop of online creative resources for children and young people to use at home or in the classroom.
While we have all been in lockdown and home-educating our children (and while teachers have been educating half of their socially-distanced classes in person and the other half remotely online, not to mention home-educating their own children in many cases too!) artists, arts organisations and creatives of all types and styles have been coming up with an incredible array of things for children, schools and families to try, to make, to watch, to be inspired by and above all to have fun with!
Our ever-expanding Mighty Hub database now contains over 100 entries listing a huge range of activities, workshops, online events and exhibitions, films, ‘how-to’ guides and more from across the East Midlands and the rest of the UK. It’s hard to choose favourites as they’re all so brilliant, but below are some of the recent entries that have impressed me the most in terms of the motivation, the scale, or maybe just the sheer creative ingenuity:
Leicester’s Curve Theatre now has a fantastic online resource of video tutorials on a huge range of topics including Design, Poetry, Character, Choreography as well as broader topics such as Daring to be Different, plus a back catalogue of archive recordings from this iconic venue.
Little Inventors is a brilliant creative education organisation that inspires imagination by taking children’s amazing ideas seriously. The website is chock-a-block of suggestions, challenges and things-to-do, as well as countless examples of ideas dreamt up by Little Inventors across the world.
Highly Sprung is a fabulous Midlands performance company that is completely focused on working with children and young people. The company’s new digital resource for primary and secondary schools ‘Ready, BoxSet, Go!’, offers schools a series of brilliant engaging, dynamic packages.
International Islamic street artist Mohammed Ali’s YouTube art lesson on ‘How to Make Art to Change the World’ is intensely personal, very accessible and a brilliant and inspirational resource for schools.
Lincoln-based Zest Theatre creates extraordinary work with teenagers allowing their voices to be properly heard and amplified. The culmination of Zest’s 2020 project ‘*untitled’ is a powerful, uplifting and beautiful short film that everyone should watch.
If you’re looking for a website that is just full of ideas of things to try with kids then look further than Muddy Faces. Based around the Forest School approach to education that focuses on using the outdoors as an inspirational learning environment, it is absolutely crammed full of suggestions.
These are just a few examples – hopefully you’ll have your own and TMC would love to hear about why you love them. If there are other creative opportunities out there that you think should be added to our Hub please let us know.
Artsmark@mightycreatives.streamstudio2.co.uk
Simon Hollingworth is a freelance Creative Producer who has curated the content of our Mighty Hub.
