The Creative Schools program, which has been running since 2018 supported by the Department of Education WA, presents Creativity as a model which can be broken down and taught consciously. Students are supported to understand and develop the ‘Five Habits of Learning’, habits they all need to be successful. These habits – imagination, inquisitiveness, discipline, persistence and collaboration – link directly to the General Capabilities in the WA curriculum.
Over the course of Term 2 and 3, Year 6 teachers Miss Gibson and Mr Kujawksi will be collaborating with two Creative Practitioners, Trudi Bennett and Naomi West, who will combine their skills to work with their two classes.
The program will itself be a surprising process. Students will need to be bold, freely offering ideas to address problems they encounter and assuming responsibility for their learning. Through participating in creative learning projects, students will be provided with opportunities to develop and extend their critical thinking skills, as they work collaboratively to solve problems
and reflect critically on solutions.
The Creative Habits of Learning are personal attributes that we all hope to possess as adults and use competently in a subconscious way. We were not born with them, we stumbled through our childhood not knowing we needed to learn these new skills. Many of us would have learned collaboration, inquisitiveness, persistence, imagination and discipline through a mix of experience with trial and error, through observing others and through mentoring advice from parents and teachers.
Students in the program practise implementing new ideas and strategies to work on their creativity in a conscious way until they become subconsciously competent at these new skills. They can then apply them in every area of their learning and their lives.
We are looking forward to sharing the Creative Schools experience with the rest of the school community as it progresses. Keep checking here for news and updates!
View the video below to find out more about Creative Schools or visit the Creative Schools website.
Creative Schools Program Week by Week Recount
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.’
Creative Schools has helped us in many ways; we even learned a new warm up game that was about listening. Here are the five habits of learning that creative schools want us to focus on: collaborative, for example sharing products, inquisitive, for example wondering and questioning, persistent, for example daring to be different, imaginative, for example playing with possibilities, and disciplined, for example crafting and improving.
Back in week 2, Creative Schools talked to us about why the government was going to take our oval away. Creative schools wanted us to plan other ways to solve the housing problem instead of our oval being taken. In a group, we made four solutions, some were not realistic, but it was just a plan. Then we picked one main solution out of those four. Some people did underground housing, shipping container housing and under the sea housing. We then wrote reasons why our idea was a good one. After that, the groups made a little model on how their idea would look.
It all got serious in week 6, as we were writing a submission to send to the government with reasons for them not taking our oval. We wrote a paragraph with our solution and made it look professional. In week 7 of creative schools, we finished our submission and Mr K and Miss G copied all the paragraphs into one document and saved it into Connect ready for us to share.
Students from LA8 and LA9 presented their Creative Schools Projects yesterday, 28 June 2021. We invite parents to read the submission prepared by the students and we congratulate them on their hard work and commitment to the project. Thanks also to Miss Gibson and Mr Kujawski and our Creative School practitioners Naomi and Trudi.
Please click on this link to read the student submission – Year 6 Student Submission
In our last session of Creative Schools for Term 2, we shared our housing submission by having three people from LA10 join each group to listen to our ideas. We took turns in reading out our ideas and everyone got an equal turn. This was a great way to show what parts of the work we wrote in the submission. Ms Bates and Miss Goodsell came in to congratulate us on the eight page submission we wrote. We look forward to continuing Creative Schools in Term 3.
In session 1 for Term 3 2021 , LA 8 and LA9 were introduced to a new Digital Technologies topic called branching. To start, we played a game called ‘Look up, Look down’. To play we started in a circle. When Naomi or Trudi told us to look down, we had to look down and when they said look up we had to look at someone in the circle. If we looked at someone and they were looking back at us, we had to run to two separate circles. This game got us to think about having choices and making different branches. Once back in class we had to draw a diagram to show the branching of the game. We were asked to explore our own way of presenting it. Some people drew trees, some did boxes and some did eyes!
For the second session of Creative Schools in Term 3 2021, as a warmup Mrs Naomi and Mrs Trudi set up multiple stations of different sports equipment for us to create our own game. When making the games, the whole group had to use the creative habits of collaboration and imagination.
After the warmup we wrote down 6 things we liked, such as favourite animals, favourite genres and etc. Depending on what we wrote as our common interest we split into groups that had at least 3 common interests. We then brainstormed game themes and watched a video on how to play games like Ecosystem
During session 3, Term 3 2021, we started with a warm up game which was called 1, 2, 3. We had to get into partners and count to 3. Easy right? That’s what we all thought, however, it turned out there was more. Naomi told us that when we she said “one”, we would all have to clap instead, and it made things a little harder. Soon after that, to challenge us even more, Naomi said that instead of 2 we had to pat our leg. Once we had all taken things up a bit with the warm up game, Naomi eventually said that we would have to stomp instead of say 3 and we all found that tricky. Just as we thought Naomi was finished telling us what to do, she told us that we had to make up two more moves for 4 and 5. The next thing we were all doing silly dance moves whilst being very confused. We really had to use the creative habit of persistence!
After recess, we got into the group of 4 that we were in the week before and Trudi showed us some more branching ideas on the board. Then Naomi explained that we would have to choose two options from our groups interest sheet and merge them to make a game about it. For example, if I had basketball and board games it would be a game called board game basketball! Next we had to use our branching skills to tell the steps of the game while using the key words ‘if’ and ‘then’. When we finished, we shared our ideas to the people in our group. Everyone then voted on which idea they wanted to add on to. Before we knew it the hour of creative schools was over! We are looking forward to developing our games and their branching next week.
In session 4, we started with a collaborative warm up. In this warm up we had to have four players holding the corners of a blanket. Then, we put a ball on the blanket and we had to lift the blanket to throw the ball and catch it. We needed to move with the ball and catch it, so everyone had to be collaborative and attentive.
In session 5, Trudi started with a riddle warmup which consisted of drawing shapes on the board. This made us look at the drawing even though the drawing had nothing to do with the answer of the riddle. Trudi put her hands on her hips which made us finally find out what the riddle was. We had to challenge our assumptions.
In both of these weeks, we worked on our own game design. We completed our branching and tried out our games by sharing them with another group. Next week, we will be giving and receiving feedback on what was good and what could be improved.
During the time period of Week 6 and Week 7 lots of amazingly creative things have been going on in school. We were all given the job of making a tutorial of our game in a certain time limit of not under 1 but not over 2 minutes. Creative Schools helps kids and teachers develop their 5 habits of learning which are collaborative, inquisitive, persistent, imaginative and disciplined. These habits don’t just help us with school but they are a constant reminder of how to organise our thoughts and opinions throughout our lives.
All groups have been working hard to make sure that their videos are well edited and are presentable. Miss Naomi and Miss Trudi have also been walking around and checking on us and providing ideas that could assist us with this task. Campbell Primary School is very lucky to be one of the few schools that are able to learn in a creative way. All teachers and students are thankful for this opportunity for learning in a new way and we all look forward to our next Creative Schools lesson.
For the end of Creative Schools LA8 and LA9 shared their video’s with LA10 about the games that they created throughout this term. LA10 had to rate all the videos that were shown on the day. Later the three classes went to play biggerty-biggerty-bop. The Creative Schools teachers added some new rules to make the game more difficult and challenging.
The students in LA8 and LA9 counted up their creative habits counters to see which creative habits they used the most. The teacher then made a graph to show the results. We used the collaborative and imaginative habits the most.
This was the last Creative Schools lesson so all the students in Year 6 said goodbye to the Creative School teachers
From the Year 6 Campbell Primary School Students.