WEA courses

This course focuses on bolstering confidence through practical language skills necessary for daily interactions. Participants will engage in conversations relevant to various aspects of everyday life. The course aims to empower learners from diverse backgrounds, including those facing socio-economic challenges. Through targeted language instruction and confidence-building exercises, learners will develop essential linguistic abilities vital for active participation in their communities. Confidence in English is tailored for learners working towards accredited ESOL.

Discover the wonderful world of the English language with this beginners ESOL course. It will help you to develop basic speaking, listening, reading and writing skills in English. Whether you have studied basic English before or you are completely new to it, You will find value in this ESOL course. Develop your language skills to enable you to recognise simple words, prepare to write, ask everyday questions and answer them using correct grammatical structures. You do not need any special tools to attend, just yourself and some enthusiasm. Start your language journey today by registering for this course

Ever wished that you had the skill to add figures to your artwork? Not quite ready to attend a life drawing class? This short course is an ideal introduction to the basics of figure drawing. Our experienced and supportive tutor will lead you through exercises covering proportion, posture, character and clothing. It will give you the confidence to create characters to include in your own paintings and feel able to tackle figure drawing from life. We will not be working from a life model. A great short course to get you started with figure drawing.

Explore your creativity through clay. You will learn about the materials, tools, and techniques to hand build pots using air drying clay. Create your own unique pieces of ceramic art, learning skills and techniques to complete your work with surface decoration, pattern, and texture. Ideal for beginners, the tutor will guide you through the process in a fun and supportive class. Join us to enjoy some calm creativity and find a new hobby for the summer.

Part of the WEA Art and About Festival 2024. This course will provide opportunities to make drawing studies of female sculptural forms from a variety of ancient cultures in the British Museum. This includes comparisons with examples from Greek, Roman and Aztec cultures found on pots, temple columns, busts and smaller figurines. These drawing activities hope to provide a deeper insight into their visual differences as well as symbolic details. This will then enable us to reflect on and discuss what we can uncover about women's lives and their roles in those societies. Meeting Point is the Lion in the main Atrium at the British Museum

Do you find yourself tired and stressed out at the end of the day? Are you looking for a hobby to relax you and help you unwind? Join me and discover the therapeutic art of paper-crafting and benefit from its profound impact on promoting a peaceful mind and lower stress levels. This course combines creative expression with mindfulness techniques to help you achieve a sense of peace and calm through the varied world of paper-crafts. On this course we will explore various paper-crafts from the clean and simple arts of origami and card-making to the messy randomness of collage, painting and mixed media. On our journey of exploration we will look at different mindfulness practices as we immerse ourselves in the joy of creating and crafting to help our general and mental wellbeing. On this course you will: v Practice basic paper-crafting techniques v Look at ways to be mindful while crafting v Engage in hands on projects designed to foster creativity and aid relaxation.. This course is anyone whether you are a long term crafted, a beginner or maybe you are new to crafting and are looking for a new hobby to engage in to help you deal with the stresses of life in the today's world. Everyone is welcome.

Empower yourself with practical skills to manage your money, make savvy shopping decisions, and master the art of budgeting with our Money Management Essentials course. Explore everyday scenarios like comparing prices, optimizing transportation costs, and meal planning, gaining insights to navigate personal finance confidently. With interactive lessons, practical exercises, and flexible learning, this short course is tailored for beginners and those seeking to refine their financial literacy. Join us on the path to financial empowerment and take control of your financial future today!

This eight week course is a public speaking course, where you will learn about the fundamentals of public speaking and be recording speaking about a subject that you are passionate about to a peer. Then listening to it and deciding how you could improve your public speaking. You will be guided by our expert tutor who will offer advice and techniques; all of which are designed to improve your delivery when addressing more than one person. All steps towards public speaking will be applauded and celebrated as you learn with others on a course designed to help you present yourself with an air confidence, panache and professionalism.

Take a Picture , this time with a broad ‘Summer Theme’- Tell Its Story, a fun, friendly and structured approach to aid you in finding inspiration, putting pen paper and get writing. Every picture tells a story, so we put the focus on getting creative and being inspired by a variety of pictures (ideally taken by yourself with a different theme to prompt us each session). We apply some key hints, tricks and craft to our writing which could be inspired by memory found in fact, fiction or somewhere in between - developing ideas throughout each session.

This five week series of workshops will explore your creativity. We will concentrate on writing drawn from personal experience, writing poems and short stories. Each session will concentrate on one specific aspect of inspiration and technique, and at the conclusion of each session students will have created enough material to be in a position to write the first draft of a piece of prose or a poem. We will explore how to develop personal experience and transform it into writing. We will also explore narrative shapes of the short story: causative situations, rising action, climax and denouement versus alternative strategies, plot construction: how to build convincing narratives. We will discover characterisation, how to develop psychologies for your evolving characters and traditional and contemporary techniques for poems. Each workshop will be self-contained but taken together will establish the main elements of writing short stories.