In our first week of Creative Schools we met our creatives, Trudy and Naomi. First we went to the school oval in our respective classes, LA8 and LA9 to play some warm up games and get our brains started.
The first game we played was the Stop and Go game. This activity helped us with our listening skills as the main objective was to move around and when the creatives said ‘go’ we walked and when they said ‘stop’ we stopped. The creatives then made the game more complicated by adding other instructions before cheekily reversing the instructions meaning! This managed to trick us, just a tiny bit, and we had to use persistence to not give up! We also played another game where we had to ask an object a question. This game focused on our inquisitiveness.
After the games, we went to our classroom and discussed the five habits of creative learning which are collaborative, inquisitive, imaginative, disciplined and persistent. Our challenge was to use our imagination to construct a creature to represent one of the five creative habits, using only newspaper, tape and string! See some of our designs below.
In week 2 of Creative Schools, we warmed up our brains by brainstorming as many possible uses for leaves. We then played with possibilities by creating leaf art. We had just started this activity, when Ms Goodsell and Ms Bates interrupted our session. They announced that our oval was going to be reclaimed by the Government and used for housing. We were shown a slideshow explaining why the Campbell Primary School oval was selected and letting us know that we had until June to put in a submission to the Government if we were unhappy with their decision. Everyone was really sad, angry and confused so the creatives, Trudi and Naomi, told us to brainstorm ways to save the school oval. We came up with lots of great solutions!
Two hours later Ms Bates told us that it was a role play and we were all very relieved.
In our third and fourth sessions of Creative Schools, we continued to work on playing with possibilities to find housing solutions in Canning Vale without us having to lose our school oval! We were split into groups depending on the solution we came up with. The groups were: urban design (which had to find other areas of land for housing), new building designs (like underground or over water housing), and new ways of living (changing our housing layouts). We created posters of our ideas to include as attachments to support our submission. In these sessions we were using the creative habits of being inquisitive and imaginative as we explored and investigated different ideas.
In session five, we played a warm up game called ‘man on the moon’ which focused on attentive listening and being respectful to others.
Trudi shared with us the State Government law about reclaiming land, showing us that the Government can reclaim Crown or freehold land if they need to. To stop the Government from claiming our oval, we would have to introduce a bill into parliament, amending the current law so that school land cannot be claimed.
We wrote a persuasive paragraph about our solutions and shared them in a parliamentary role play. We focused on the habit ‘Collaborative – sharing the product and giving and receiving feedback.’
From the Year 6 Campbell Primary School Students.