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.