Make your own ancient rockpool

Inspired by fossils

Make your own ancient rockpool

what might you find…

A Derwent Stories activity

What might you have found if you had strolled along the beach of an ancient sea a few hudnred million years ago….

beachcombing might have revealed all sorts of finds…

We have used this easy technique many times. We designed it for public events where we would have to make a lot of rockpools with visitors in a short space of time but it is very versatile and you could adapt to suit your situation. While this was set up as a prehistoric event you could of course make a modern rockpool, or perhaps a pond!

We used this activity on our Derwent Stories event at the National Stone Centre

This activity guide uses the materials we used with notes about why we chose this or that

You will need

• a dish – we used waxed card pie dishes (buy in packs from discount stores and supermarkets). Most of our dishes were white but the occasional black ones that we found worked well, too!
• acrylic paint – to paint on the waxed card – we use large bottles but you could get some small tubes, or try mixing some poster or redimix paint with PVA glue and see if that works
• paint brushes or sponges
• Plastic plate to squirt the paint onto (easy to clean)
• small pieces of this card
• coloured pens or pencils
• sharp scissors
• a small stapler (the smaller the better)
• PVA glue
• scraps of stuff: sponge, wool, carrier bag, felt, glitter, sand…..

materials and a sheet of paper to work on

 

Thinking about fossils

Our aim was to make a rockpool that you might have found if you could have gone walking along a Carboniferous seashore 300 million years ago. You might want to find pictures of some of the animals of the time to help you. Or maybe you have some fossils to look at? Or some plastic ancient sea creatures? Could you visit your local museum and do some drawings…Perhaps if you printed out this page and waved it at them, they would set up an event for all you ancient rockpoolers?

starting to paint

Prepare the pool

Cover your work surface with a sheet of paper – acrylic paint can be hard to clean off. Cover yourself as well if you are a messy worker. You might want an old shirt rather than another sheet of paper

Select your rockpool colours: blue, green turquoise and raw ochre are often good. Smear them round the inside of your pool (paintbrush or painting sponge). You do not need to be too precise here. It is  background and more a sense of sand, rock and water that is needed rather than detailed painting

Set to one side to dry

a pool set aside to dry

 

Prepare the wildlife

Ok. Now it’s up to you……

our rockpool animals

In this pool we have:

• drawings of a trilobite and an ammonite (should we have coloured these in?)
• drawing of a horseshoe crab that has been cut, folded and stapled to give it a more 3-D effect
• drawing of a coral
• fragments of one of my painting sponges have given us some rock
• green wool and a shredded green carrier bag have give us some seaweed
• Fingertip coral: made by wrapping plastercloth round a finger…

Fitting the wildlife

You could glue everything straight onto the dish, or make little brackets to lift things up off the floor and wall a little

 

Brackets might be small bits of foam or thin strips of card either folded or zig-zagged into a spring

brackets and supports

Carefully glue them in place.  A matchstick can be helpful in applying glue

 

Let it all dry, sit back and admire. Then go and tell someone about the day you found a trilobite…..or take and print a photo and send it as a postcard to someone else?

a finished rockpool

 

 

Or send us that photo and we’ll have a gallery of rockpools!

 

 

 

 

 

a pool made in an (old) mixing bowl

 

 

Derwent Stories

seasons, stories and art outdoors

 

what will you find?

Over the summer and autumn of 2018, Stone and Water are running a series of creative outdoor events structured to support families with children with additional needs. With funding from Derwentwise and Foundation Derbyshire, and advice and support from Umbrella, events are happening along the Lower Derwent Valley.

 

Activities are planned to encourage people to come out and enjoy the local environment in simple, cheerful ways that families could repeat for themselves. So we look at the places where families might go, wildlife they might meet and activities they could do. Activities are planned to use everyday resources and to be simple to plan and deliver – the sorts of things you could rummage out of a cupboard, stuff into a bag and have fun with

 

In planning for additional needs, we are trying to find readily accessible sites – wheel- and push- chair friendly (not all of them will work but the majority ). Events are very relaxed in timetable: there is structure here, a shape for us to work around but that shape will respond to our visitors so if you need to just stop for a bit, we can, or if you need to go and shout a bit on your own we will plan for spaces where that can happen. And if you decide you are feeling grumpy and fed up, then none of us will judge you for it or hold it against you….

So, we are off adventuring and after each events we post blogs

• Where have we been and
• What did we do – so you could go to the same place or take the same activities somewhere else
• Today, we are catching up with these posts – as they complete, we will post links here

 

fingers full of coelacanths

Activities:

July: National Stone Centre with some fossil moments

Blogs:

• visiting the Stone Centre and fossil fingerpuppets
• make your own ancient rockpool – an activity to do at home

August: Darley Park: a day of bumblebees, butterflies and picnics

• visiting Darley Park
• make your own Bumble and Butterfly book

The next events:

• Wednesday 29^th August at Carsington Water – a day of storytelling and storymaking using natural materials – session through the day
• Sunday 16^th September: Altitude Festival, Wirksworth: making puppets inspired by rocks and fossils
• Saturday 22^nd September: autumn art and stories in Lea Woods (meet at High Peak Junction car park)
• Friday 2^nd November: Mills, canals and creatures: a day of big drawings at Cromford Mills as part of the Discovery days programme

 

All these events are free (some places there might be a charge for car parking). Materials are provided and no bookings Is needed. Check on each day for timing of activities

 

Details of events will post here and on our facebook page: Stone and Water

ready for action…

NEXT EVENT

• Wednesday 29^th August Summer Stories at Carsington Water – a day of storytelling and storymaking using natural materials – session through the day

Summer stories at Carsington

Summer stories

Tales of wild creatures and adventurous children!

hero, clay monster and useful twigs

Wednesday 29^th August 2018

Carsington Water, Derbyshire

 

There are adventures everywhere and stories waiting to be told, tales waiting to be heard. In the wind whispering through the leaves, in the shadows under the bench, in the sudden splash of something in a pond.

 

Join artist and storyteller Gordon MacLellan for tales of brave hedgehogs and naughty rabbits, fierce mice and reckless beetles. We will tell a tale or two and then create our own, making brand new stories for ourselves out of leaves and weather and whatever we find

 

There will be short sessions through the day, so come along and join in, listen, laugh and create your own tales of excitement, adventure or maybe terror

 

a story collected on a plate

When: Wednesday 29^th August

Where: Carsington Water, Ashbourne: DE6 1ST

Times: there will be sessions running 10am – 12noon, 1pm – 3pm: any one session of stories and making things up lasting about 45 minutes – but feel free to drop in and drop out as you will!

The activity is free but there is a fee for car parking

Materials provided

Meeting point: outdoor classroom area

Booking: none needed

 

Like all the Derwent Stories events,  Summer Stories is open to anyone but is planned for and structured around families including children with additional needs

The Derwent Stories project is put together with help from Umbrella, Derwentwise and Derby Parks. Stone and Water is happy to acknowledge grant aid from Foundation Derbyshire  and Derwentwise

 

Contact for more info:

Facebook: Stone and Water

Email: stoneandwater@btinternet.com

a drum a rug and a kettle: a recipe for adventures

Rockpools and trilobites

After rocks, fossils and wriggly creatures

our day at the National Stone Centre

we don’t know if there were hammerheads all those years ago…but there could have been!

completing a crinoid

Fossils to hold, investigate and draw, a sheet to fill in, or new sheets of paper for your own drawings. There were plastic models of what the organisms who we meet as fossils might have looked like “why is this shark pink?”, “this one’s got lots of legs”,  “Someone thought it might be…”, “Is there a better colour for a prehistoric shark, do you think?”, “Hmmmm….”

Our fossils collections were mostly of Carboniferous Limestone animals: the sorts of  creature who might have been swimming in the sea 290 million years ago that eventually gave us the limestone of the White Peak. No, we had no dinosaurs. We had no giant sea-reptiles or winged pterosaurs. But we did have goniatites and crinoids and the last of the trilobites. There were giant fish in our seas swimming over the coral reefs that would one day raise the spiky peaks of Chrome and Park House Hills

We made prehistoric ecologies on our fingers ( see idea below)

We even made some prehistoric rock pools for a walk along an ancient shore…..

Our next Derwent Stories event will be Butterflies, bumbles and picnics  on Monday 6^th August in Darley Park in Derby

 

stroll along an ancient beach, look in an ancient rockpool

 

On our fossils day…..

Where did we go:

The National Stone Centre just outside Wirksworth. Postcode: DE4 4LS

Tripadvisor: what do other people think?

taking time with a coelacanth

What did we do:

there are walks round the site where you can see fossils in beds of rock and the bigger patterns caused by ancient seas and sand in the old quarry walls. There is lots to see and touch but they do not like people taking things away from the site or damaging their rocks (so don’t turn up with a geological hammer!)

Other activities: you can go “panning for gold” with bowls full of sand and small polished gems. The aim is to wash the sand out (big troughs of nice cool water outside for this) and find your treasures

See below for one of the activities we brought with us

Costs: there is a £1 honesty box for car parking. Otherwise access to the site is free

Toilets: in the main building, including accessible toilet. We’re not sure about changing table

Café: good selection of lunches, cakes and ice creams and nice places to sit*

Busy-ness: we were there on a sunny day at the start of the school holidays and there were always people around but not so busy that it felt crowded and noisy

Recommended: for people who like finding things out and looking at things and people who like having a bit of room

* We thought some site-specific ice creams might be good…“rare gem”– with shiny sweets in, or maybe sandstone (with caramel fragments), or even fossil ice cream with sugar shrimps…..

Derwent Stories events: after each of our DS events, we’ll post a report like this on what we did,

and where we went in the hope that other people might visit that place themselves.

We will also post instructions to try some of the activities we did as well.

 

In this blog there are finger puppet trilobites….make your own ancient rockpool and an invitation to try the Carboniferous Fossil Poem will follow shortly!

Derwent Stories

With support from Derwentwise and Foundation Derbyshire,

Stone and Water are running a series of public events in 2018 across the Derwentwise area.

All the Derwent Stories events are open to anyone but are planned for and

structured around families including children with additional needs

Fingerpuppet trilobites

You will need: a postcard-sized piece of thin card, pencil, coloured pencils, a pair of scissors, a small stapler

half a trilobite, folded card

These can start with either a drawing like the one above or half a drawing, drawn onto a piece of folded card with the fold corresponding to the main line of the cross

Cut it out, cut a line in from the edge to the side of the eye (the longer the better usually). Fold the cephalon (head) along this line, folding front over the sides. Staple in place. This will pull the head into a nice curve and the original fold will help shape the rest of the animal.

Add a ring of card to the underside, slide the puppet onto your finger and off you go! (Why not make one for every finger and have a family of them?). Use similar ideas to make other animals…look at their symmetry and overall shape: some work well with folded card (use the fold as the line through the middle of the animal to get symmetrical sides) while others are easier as simple drawings cut out and put on a finger ring

 

 

 

 

finished trilobites

 

 

 

 

 

fingers full of coelacanths