Looking ahead to the real New Year, the Unicorn Theatre will be bringing history alive in January with a double bill from Theatre Unlimited. This exciting touring company launched a Living History project in 2008, that aims to enrich GCSE History students’ appreciation and understanding of momentous events through the use of personal testimony theatre. Defying Hitler, a moving account of a young man growing up in Berlin between the two World Wars, will be revived alongside a new play called Stalin’s Favourite, about a compromised writer in Stalin’s Russia. The season runs from January 11-20th at the Unicorn, and then goes on a national tour, with further dates yet to be announced. Check it all out at www.theatreunlimited.org.
Meanwhile MOSI, the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester, hosts Inside DNA, the touring exhibition from At-Bristol which will help students get to grips with genetics by looking at subjects such as identity, health and evolution. The exhibition encourages visitors to explore developments in the fast-moving field of human genomics – and the ethical issues that they raise, for example – what impact will current research have on you and on your family’s future? Interested science teachers should click on to www.insidedna.org.uk for more details. It closes here on November 13 and will reopen on November 21 at INTECH Science Centre & Planetarium, Winchester. It then heads northwards to Birmingham.
Here’s a bit of fun for keen students of French and possibly some additional inspiration for your Modern Foreign Language Department. The website
french.about.com gives tips, quizzes and the ‘mot du jour’ that could be used as an ice-breaker. I learned two new words that might not come in handy on the wine run at Carrefour but make me feel clever – ‘un bahut’ meaning ‘sideboard’ and ‘vertement’ meanly ‘sharply’.
Finally, news of a school trip with a difference – to the National Trust’s Attingham Park in Shrewsbury where an exhibition called House of Beasts will be running until next July. Inspired by the great house’s history, the exhibition investigates human relationships with animals, from the personal to the economic perspective. For further details, follow the links from www.meadowarts.org.