On the 9th March 2011, I went with my colleagues and our English Tutor to visit the Whitworth Art Gallery, in Manchester. They have two different exhibitions in this gallery, one is textiles and one is about pictures and wallpapers. The first thing we did was enter the textile exhibition and sit around a table. Then a nice lady who is skilled in art and crafts, came to greet us.

Bianca is in the foreground of this picture

She told us we would be doing hand stitching work. She showed us how to make a cup cake made of different materials. The materials that we used were: thread, wool, needles, pinheads, pom-poms, felt material, plastic wire. We spent about two hours making a few cup-cakes. We made some really nice cup cakes.

After we finished we went around the gallery. The textile art gallery has really nice things, such as hand made rugs originally from Afghanistan, they had patterns symbolising the wars. I was impressed by this huge collage made of newspaper that had writing with headlines about politics and war. After we finished seeing the textiles we went to see the pictures and wallpapers. They have also got very good exhibits. I mostly liked the wallpapers. In particular I liked a wallpaper (symbolising a perfect paradise) showing beautiful trees and very colourful species of birds.

I really enjoyed going on this trip, and I learnt some new things like hand stitching and also knowing about other cultures from around the world.

Bianca is learning English in Rochdale with tutor, Khalda Ahmed. By the summer of 2011, Bianca will have taken, and passed, all of the Edexcel ESOL exams at Entry 3.

Well done Bianca, this is an accomplished piece of writing.

The writing in red shows where Bianca’s written English has been corrected. She can then compare her original work to the edited version here and discuss the differences with her tutor.