School’s back in Kingstanding, well for teachers it is. The pupils of Kingsthorne Primary School got the day off as Stan’s Cafe put their teachers through their creative paces. Jack and I had a fun morning introducing this enthusiastic bunch to some ideas they may consider adapting for the classroom, or corridor, or playground.
James
Last week Chris and I spent an enjoyable week @ A E Harris building human scale board games with pupils and staff of the Virtual College. Triple Trouble was a game for two teams of three played across three rooms, with quiz questions, chance and skill all tested. Heaven and Hell was a beefed up version of Ludo. Both great fun to play and spectate.
Intermittently over the last few week’s Craig has been visiting Paganel School in Birmingham has they prepare to run a big Scalextric race with customised cars. More intensive, and thus quicker on the draw, has been Jack .working with Whitehall School in Leicester. They have been practicing commentary and sports journalism, including a trip to see Leicester whip Nottingham Forest 3 – 0. Now they are set for their race tomorrow. The track has been laid and is looking very impressive as you can see. We wish them luck.
The City Adventure day passed off smoothly yesterday. We are working with Birmingham’s Virtual College a great team of teachers and pupils who operate outside the confines of a school building. In a fortnight we will spend a week with them @ A E Harris devising to human size board games. The games may well be open for the public to play on 12th March. We will keep you posted.
James
I spent last Friday in Paganel Primary School running a commentary workshop with a group of year 6 pupils. At the moment they are designing and building their own scalextric cars ready to stage a race in the school hall in a few weeks time complete with commentary. Hearing of our 24 hour commentating experience they invited us in to impart some of our wisdom and to pass on some hard learned tricks of the trade. So here distilled are some of the tips I passed on:
- you have to be able to speak and talk at the same time
- it’s all about the two Cs – concentration and improvisation
- try not to repeat yourself
- it can take a lifetime to master or longer
- try not to repeat yourself
- some people are born natural commentators and that takes a long time to learn
- sometimes silence says more than words ever can
- commentating through the night is essentially the same but darker
- don’t worry if your ship comes off its rails just keep talking
- you can get it right for 99% of the time but listeners will always remember the other 3% when you got it wrong
- try not to repeat yourself
- working in a pair can be good as three voices are often better than two
Anyway we had a great session and if the pupils do aswell next time it should be equally good or as Terry Venables once said “If history repeats itself, I should think we can expect the same thing again”
Craig
This year I was luck enough to be have given Heston Blumenthal’s Fat Duck Cook Book for my Birthday (not the one in the big slip case). I love everything about it and as I have pretty much failed to cook any dish in any recipe book I’ve ever been given, his exacting recipes intimidate me in the slighted – I’m not going to cook those either.
On Thursday I was in Walkwood Middle School, Redditch chewing on a particularly gristly problem. What do do with 180 Year 6 pupils on four afternoons and a Friday during the SATS exams? The images I couldn’t get out of my head were edible boiled sweet wrappers drying on petri-dishes, huge toffee/sugar structures and a hog roast.
Who knows what will happen…
Cross-Country trains ran smoothly yesterday whisking me to and from Leicester where I met a fantastically enthusiastic bunch of Year 6 pupils at Whitehall Primary School.
The plan is for them to become commentators and journalists covering football matches, school events and ultimately a scalextric race meeting they host in the school hall. We will agree the details with them nearer the time.
I am pleased to report this is a further example of how the apparently aimless fooling around we do can transform itself into something useful.
James
Our In Service Training session at Arrow Vale school turned out to be fun. The teachers were impressively open, game and flexible enough in their thinking to speculate how the small challenges we set them could be used in their teaching.
I think we are due back later in the year so we’ll look forward to that now.
It’s been a ridiculously long break, but the break is broken abruptly tomorrow. We’re straight in the deep-end, running a Creative Thinking session for 75 staff and 10 pupils at Arrow Vale School in Redditch.
I’m fully aware how precious In Service Training Days are in schools and how resentful staff can be if they are deemed to be wasted doing things less valuable than preparing for their lessons the following day. I am therefore quite anxious about tomorrow and have been at regular intervals throughout the holiday. Fingers crossed.
It
Bright Space had kindly invited me to speak at a conference they were holding for teachers, artists and creative agents thinking about the place of architecture and design in schools. After my largely extemporized presentation (the basic text of which can be found here), I hung around to experience a great practical session presented by the architect Abbas Shah, who had us constructing increasingly large tetrahedrons from dowel and elastic bands and Sharon Plant from the Sorrel Foundation who talked about some of their very high quality looking engagements with schools.
Since getting home I’ve been looking for dowel and elastic bands to get cracking on my own construction project. Eve and I have been collecting the red elastic bands discarded by postal workers for about a year now, so they were easy to find (though I fear they are of a poor quality and not up to construction standards), the dowel is proving more elusive.
James
