Old friends

Creative Practitioners can be a 'new face' in school, it's one of the reasons we are employed, and consequently most projects involve meeting new students. It's always nice then, when one sees familiar faces in a group. Today I worked with year three at Paganel Primary School who I last worked with around this time last year. I took small groups out of their regular lessons to interview each other on the subject of their recent school trips. With each group, I began by asking them what they remembered about last year's project. In most cases they began telling me this without being asked!
Why talk about last year's project, when it has nothing to do with what we're doing now? I wasn't sure at all, and it was some time before I realised that what we were doing replaced the 'getting to know you' activities that I would do with a new group. We were reestablishing a working relationship that was a year old. I believe that our experience of time is roughly relative to the total time we have lived, therefore one year for an eight/nine year old would be equivalent to over four years for me. After this kind of break, reminiscing is a natural way to begin again.
We then had a whole class session for the last hour and a half of the day, editing the interviews together with video taken on the school trips. We edited on the smart board with the students taking turns to come up to the board and work on the video. After about twenty minutes of this, the teacher took around half of the class, who were unable to focus on what we were doing any longer, out to allow the other half, who were benefiting from the experience, to continue. We edited two comments together with two clips over the whole period of time. Pretty slow going to be sure, but the we were working to a standard above anything that has been edited by pupils of any year in school up to now.

Life's a beach

My first experience of working in my own children's school. Interesting. I'm not sure if I'm being treated as a parent or as a practitioner. Probably because I'm not sure which I am being.
The project idea fits in with a seaside theme and the end product is a video depicting beach scenes of the past present and future, designed to be shown across the school's three adjacent big screens.
This was a non-stop day in which I filmed all three, year-two classes in groups of one to six. The pupils had a very exciting day, dressing up and waiting for their turn to come down to the hall to be filmed. They'd show me their planned scene, then I'd have to figure out how to make it work within the constraints of the ten-foot wide green screen.
Like many parent, I don't hear much from my children about what they do at school. Today at least I knew what one of them was doing. For fifteen minutes.

Where have all the pirates gone?

2nd Session at St. Peter's, a full day this time in the company of Hayley (Script Writer).

The initial challenge was for the reporter from each of the four groups to tell their 'maths problem' story to the class. Did all the group know/agree on their story? Could one member of the group summarise it coherently? Answers: 'no' and 'no'. After an hour of further work around the tables, those answers were 'yes' and 'pretty much'.

Hayley and I worked over break to find an overall narrative that would link the four scenes into one story. This came together nicely, and was a hysterical conversation, haunted by the spirits of the pirates that had been cut from the first scene and were keen to re-enter the story at any point.

Led the pupils through acting out the whole story together to introduce our narrative.

Joined after lunch by Creative Agent, Nicky. Back into groups to role-play, develop and record the scenes. All this acting out has really energised the development process and got the groups working together in a focused way. Finally watched back the four scenes. Over to Hayley now to run the next session on Script development.

My fave pupil idea today: 'The sea-horses have to eat odd numbers of fish because it is called the 'Odd Sea'

I like to go a wandering...

Started a new project today at St. Peters Primary School in Shropshire. I spent the morning there and the afternoon at Wroxeter Roman City, about half an hour away. I'm starting to quite appreciate driving time as time alone to think and also to catch up on phone calls, using headset, of course!

The St Peters project is all about using video to set maths problems. First, the problems must be expressed as stories. I rashly picked an example puzzle on the spur of the moment to make into a story. No one, myself included, could really fully express the puzzle as a story, but it certainly got brains working. We then moved into group work, with each of four groups having a different puzzle to work on. Introducing the roles of Chairman, Writer, Reporter and Researcher allowed the groups to progress from working in ones or twos to really focused work in groups of up to seven.

At Wroxeter, Pupils from Lord Silkin, Ercall Wood and Sutherland Secondary Schools were to storyboard their film, which is a time-travel drama, educational resource for KS2 pupils. The script is written, albeit in draft form, and so the task was to imagine and draw each camera angle required. From a quick try at this yesterday I could see that the Students imaginations far exceeded their drawing ability, so instead of drawing the angles, I came up with the idea of setting up the scenes using boxes and buildings and cut-outs as characters. Luckily, Tony (Drama Practitioner) and I arrived ten minutes before the group and had a chance to discuss this plan. Tony suggested that the students themselves walk-through the scenes and we photograph that. This was a 1.5 hour session, and we really used every minute to cover all but one of the locations called for in the script.

Back in time...

I took the scenic route to Wroxeter Roman City. Half an hour longer than on the Motorway, but much nicer.