14/05/2008 by James.

Yesterday was the last session of the year at Pitton, and we asked the children what they wanted to do, what materials they wanted to use, and showed them photos from across this year to support them in remembering the range of places and materials that they had explored so far.

They chose to revisit the junk materials, and the outside spaces and features around the pre-school, creating moving structures from bamboo, foam, and a strong wind, working together in teams to develop new relationships, and using role-play to test out new or recurring ideas.

A case study exploring the learning that has taken place for individual children at Pitton Pre-School, as a result of their involvement in this year’s research, will be published over the next couple of months on the 5×5x5=creativity website .

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09/05/2008 by James.

Creative Thinkers=Powerful Minds is a conference for strategy leaders, head teachers, artists, teachers and anyone interested in exploring this belief in children’s and young people’s creative capacities and participation. The conference and workshops will enable you to reflect upon and commit to shaping the future direction of education towards developing creative thinking and powerful minds.

Keynote speakers will address topics including personalisation, participation, mass creativity and transformation. Speakers include: leading authority on innovation and creativity Charles Leadbeater, author of We-Think; artist Richard Wentworth, Master of Drawing, Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, University of Oxford; Professor and Professor Anna Craft, Chair of Education, Exeter University, Reader, Open University and Visiting Scholar, Harvard University.

‘For centuries, children have expected adults to believe in them – in their talents, their sensitivity, their creative intelligence and their desire to understand their surroundings. We have to understand them through the things they want to do and show they can do. Children use a 100 languages to teach us and show us. They have an inexhaustible desire to learn.’ Loris Malaguzzi, Founder and Director of Reggio Emilia,1992

More information at www.5×5x5creativity.org.uk

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09/05/2008 by James.

Encouraging the children to recall what they did last week in their own words gave us further insight into the learning behind their play and where they were taking it. We gave them chance to watch the video of the last session, and tell us what they were doing in their own words, before encouraging them to start to plan todays session, listing the materials they would need and where they needed to play to carry their ideas out.

They chose to revisit the construction materials, and we provided some extra recycled materials from the scrap store, working on the field again, where a stronger narrative and role-play element came through, as bowls were filled for imaginary dogs and the sensory experience of moulding cut grass let to the creation of a production line to mix food for them.

The group negotiated roles amongst their team of ‘workers’ and ideas flowed, triggered by the new materials added and the features of the field around them.

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01/05/2008 by James.

Today we gave the children a chance to explore the tubes again, combined with sheets of hardboard, wooden blocks, piping, canes and willow. We wanted to give them a chance to bring together their fascination with connecting and exploring inner/outer spaces with the ‘real-world’ of the walk last week, and the more immediate landscape of the field behind the pre-school.
Key areas of interest from the walk around the village (paths, drives up or down hills to houses, walls constructed of stone or brick, drains and gullies) reappeared and were revisited through the creation of structures and the marking-out of spaces across the ground and up a grassy bank, whilst imaginary play turned some of these into houses, spaceships and beds.

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22/04/2008 by James.

Today we walked around the village, stopping to explore walls, snails, drains and ditches, mud, and a horse - encouraging the children to use all their senses and giving them chance to translate the learning from and interest in tubes/pipes and inside/outside spaces into the context of the real world.

Coversations grew up around the snails sheltering in a drain pipe and the path of a drainage channel that ran alongside the road, and individual children used their bodies to follow routes mapped out by landscape features such as kerbs, gravel patches and dry ditches, noting the sounds and textures that they found along the way, and recording their finds with cameras.

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21/04/2008 by James.

… its been a bit quiet on the blog as I have been setting up a new initiative called ‘Creative Ecology’ (www.creative-ecology.co.uk).

I have set up Creative Ecology to deliver a programme of participatory arts projects and training/consultancy, that supports people in exploring their identity and developing greater environmental awareness, in a hands-on, creative way.

I will continue to work in partnership with schools, community and environmental organisations, and other artists, to set up these opportunities and to share our work to a wider audience through training events etc.

I am back working on 5×5x5 tomorrow, so there will be some more news and photos on the children’s explorations around the village of Pitton later this week.

I am also in Poole for a couple of days later this week, working with reception-age children to explore pattern and texture through rubbings, clay impressions and casting of their local outside space; linking to their recent visit to the Jurassic Coast and theme of fossilisation and dinosaur teeth!

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25/03/2008 by James.

By expanding the choice of materials offered to the children this week, we hoped to see whether their individual interests and ways of working that they have displayed so far, would cross the media boundaries and show themselves again.

We also aimed to give them access to materials that they may be able to find themselves and use in the future, whether in 5×5x5/pre-school or at home, so that they can continue to learn by exploring creatively and confidently outside of our session time.

As the children are getting more confident with working (playing) with me they are also getting more used to talking about their investigations and the thinking behind them… several times today spilling into story-telling and narrative as twigs became trees waving in the wind and a plastic tube acted as a man cutting down a hedge.

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18/03/2008 by James.

This week we introduced clay and smaller scale recycled materials (plastic tube, lolly sticks, stones, fir-cones etc). We aimed to allow the children to combine their earlier interests in mark-making/sensory investigation with the later focus on tubes, inside and outside spaces, wrapping/enveloping and measuring - linking learning experiences and extending/translating technical skills into new media.

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12/03/2008 by James.

Another session using and exploring tubes and a range of scrap materials - this time with some plastic plumbing pipe and connectors to extend the children’s experience of connecting and exploring pipes and tubes, investigating length, height and measuring, developing new ways of creating sound and working together to solve technical problems.

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06/03/2008 by James.

This week the tubes became the key focus for the group… I had added more plastic and cardboard tubes, string, ribbon and elastic to enable them to take their explorations in connecting, posting and exploring inner and outer space even further… One boy found several ways to produce different sounds from one tube, calling down it, tapping and banging it and scraping it against the floor… others explored their length and height or clustered them together, carefully wrapping and ‘nesting’ them with unfurling receipt rolls and lengths of elastic.

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