Quick intro to me and my work, and a very brief overview of the Creative Schools program and the five habits. Students pretty quiet so went very quickly into main warm-up - see screenshot - about chocolate bars - which would be good at science and which would be a good friend - discuss with your table mates (mostly groups of three). Took some coaxing but then had some great answers - Milky Way and Mars got lots of votes as best at science “because - space!”, another said Caramello because koalas are an animal to study in biology etc. 

As their current curriculum content is the respiratory system, and Tom had indicated they were weak with spelling their vocabulary, we decided to do a vocab-related respiratory system review as a kind of introduction to Creative Schools. Students had access to a bunch of different craft materials and letters, and we gave them a word list, told them to choose one word and create a creative representation of it using the materials. Assigned students to random groups of 3 or 4 after getting them to line up in birthday order without talking (lots of good creative solutions to that!).

Some groups took a while to get started but by the end everyone had created something worthy and could give an explanation of it. Many went with the more obvious “diaphragm” (but at least they got to practice spelling it!), but my favourite outcome was the group who picked “alveoli” without really knowing what it meant, they just liked the sound of the word, and were able to link it to “ravioli” and after chatting with Tom understood that they were air sacs which they immediately linked to ravioli (and made some out of paper) - they’ll never forget this term again!

Short session (1 hr 5 min total) and students so engaged with hands-on activity that we didn’t spend a lot of time on reflection, but looked again briefly at the wheel and focused on discussing collaboration, as they had all complained when I put them in randomised groups, but most then worked well.

Happy with how it went, the students were really receptive after initially just being quiet, and we managed to meet our goal of revising a little curriculum content while also getting students used to how a Creative Schools lesson will work.

Happy to note they all enjoyed the hands-on activities (Tom says anything that looks different to traditional book work is always well received), and after a little prompting every group ended up having some great creative ideas. They were not happy about collaborating outside their friendship groups but generally speaking this went fine, just a couple of students less involved.

We plan to start on the rocks/minerals content next session which, because of assessment tasks, will be a bit over a fortnight after our first session. Amanda to consider best way to creatively introduce our FIFO ideas.

Need to consider the tech issues a little with our podcast idea, some students have iPads and some students don’t have device at all.

Need to email the school coordinator and get started thinking about these possibilities.