Creative curriculum
Case Study: Norristhorpe Junior School
Birch was invited to become a Creative Partner at Norristhorpe Junior Infant and Nursery School in Kirklees in April 2011
Working with two full classes of up to 30 year 4 children, the brief was to use the outdoors to improve literacy with emphasis on poetry, developing scripts and moral dilemmas.
With eight half day sessions per class, it was possible to first expose the children to more dynamic story making involving all of the senses and participation by the children themselves. Activities which spring boarded from these initial story days fed into further sessions around poetry creation and word play.
Children explored for interesting “treasures” which went into their poetry bags and acted as stimulus for language which was then shaped into poems by the children. By choosing the exciting witches scene from Macbeth and setting the scene with props and costume the classes were able to engage in rhyme as a group.
At the request of the teachers, the next session was also given over to poetry, this time with an adventurous slant. Beginning by deconstructing “The Owl and the Pussycat”, the classes moved onto several challenges both mental and physical themed around an adventurous shipwreck on a far away shore.
The last three sessions focused on story making and how that might take place. One session was given over to my story bag which children could dip into to randomly choose a story. Story themes ranged from traditional folk tales to fantasy stories and parables. Some had a humorous element with varied accents and some were mobile stories ranging all over the site.
The penultimate session was around story building. The classes took part in various improvisation exercises then began working on their own story ideas. Puppets, props and costume were introduced alongside story sticks as an aide memoire.
The final session was all about the children telling their stories. Their tokens were placed into a story bag and chosen at random. There was quite an array of subject matter, costumes, props and sound effects throughout the day with much laughter and occasional bewilderment on the part of the audience.
The evaluation carried out at the end of the session indicated that the children’s attitude to literacy, storytelling and poetry had improved with teaching staff indicating a high level of enjoyment, engagement and excitement in the process.
Case Study: Princeville Junior School
Birch was invited to become a Creative Partner at Princeville Junior School in Bradford in January 2009. My role was to work with other creatives and staff from the school to develop an outdoor classroom on waste ground adjacent to the school and in keeping with the Creative Partnership remit, to promote creative approaches to teaching at the school.
I worked closely with reception teachers to devise and run sessions in the school grounds with fire as the central theme. the reception classes were looking at different cultures using the “My granny went to market” book. From the cultures/countries in the book, Mexico, African and Japan were chosen as the subjects for three themed days during which fire was used for: cooking food; as a social focus for storytelling and as an industrial tool to produce dyes for kite painting.
The feedback from these sessions and other activities run throughout the school as well as consultation with staff and children informed the CP process at every stage and helped the decision making process with regard to the development of the outdoor classroom.
Following the first ever visit to a local wood:
"“In twenty years when I am grown up I will come and live in the woods”
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“Sir, you are better than the didgeridoo man”
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