Hello, my name is Tess and I'm going to show you our blackboard stencils.
Every classroom had a blackboard in their room. Children all faced towards the blackboard as it was a major teaching tool.
The blackboard stencils – a teacher could order a set of stencils from Melbourne so they're Australian made.
This is the blackboard stencil I've chosen to show you. This is a frieze so it is a long strip drawing. This one is called Spring fields. It's a very delicate brown paper and it has a series of holes which is what creates the picture and we're going to fix that to the blackboard.
Having fixed the frieze to the blackboard I'm now going to use our duster, our blackboard duster. We're going to tap.
All right, so now I've dusted the frieze I'm going to take the frieze away. You can see what's been left behind. Here's all the dots that we've hit with the duster.
All the chalk is left behind on the blackboard. Now we have our chalk dots on the blackboard we're going to use chalk – a box of coloured chalks – we're going to use to fill in the dots.
The paper blackboard stencils were used to decorate the board and were to provide illustrations and maps for learning and as a visual aid. Picture stencils were mainly used in the infants classroom and map stencils would have been used in the primary classes.
The blackboard stencils are very rare we are lucky to have a wide variety of stencils in the Schoolhouse Museum collection.
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