Starting our mining and minerals topic today (first time for them to cover this in class at all), so we wanted to have a quick warm-up that led into the content. We used several A3 maps of minesites and mineral distribution across WA from Dept of Mines, cut into 4-6 pieces like a jigsaw, and students each received one piece. Had to circulate in class to find the other pieces and create a full map with their new group. Asked them to see what minerals they could find, what was most common (iron ore) and could they find some unusual ones (yep, some we’d never heard of, eg tantalum!). 

We wanted to introduce the six stages of mining from the curriculum but also gauge what their prior knowledge was, so we gave them piles of post-it notes and asked them to write down one activity they knew happened at a mine site per post-it. Once they had a good collection we introduced the six stages, had an A3 page with each stage, then asked them to come and add their post-its to the right stage. Lots of good discussion and impressed at what they managed to come up with after a bit of coaxing!

Second part of this activity was to design their own miner - we had a worksheet template for them to come up with a name, info about their job, etc, mostly they focused on working hours. Time was short but managed to get Jimmy and Bibak to jump up for a quick recorded “podcast” interview about their miner with the lapel mics, good to see some enthusiasm. 

J-Rome who’d been a bit disruptive came up to the board with me to be in charge of pointing to which parts of the Creative Habits wheel we’d most focused on today. Spoke mostly about collaboration, especially from the warm up, and persistence - starting activities that they initially found hard but managed to get into with time.

Want to move on to set up their term project next week - discussed how much scaffolding they’ll need vs our desire to give them buy-in and autonomy! Aiming for a middle ground.

Happy to see that as we’d hoped, a number of them have relatives who work or have worked FIFO, and know something about it - or don’t know much about it and are now wondering (hopefully will go off and chat with these relatives!)

Slow to get into tasks but with help nearly all groups are working well and coming up with good ideas. They like to be up and about, so activities that include this are great. Anything that looks different to “normal book learning” is something that appeals.

Multiple shorter activities works well with them despite the short lesson length.

Will go deeper into FIFO life and set up their project next session. 

Thinking we will offer them some flexibility in their project choice eg podcast, video, could be roleplay etc. Tom thinks (I agree!) they’ll need a fairly scaffolded project to be able to make progress, but with room for their input.

Tom to source pins for our planned individual reflection wheels

Need to find out what we can get added to school Insta etc.

Started with rocks today, to touch on that part of our mining curriculum. I’d brought in a couple of boring rocks from my garden but Tom came through with trays of way more interesting rocks, students could work alone or with a partner, and had to imagine what else this could be. At first many students were very literal about it or misunderstood and tried to use their science knowledge, but after some additional examples and redirection most pairs came up with some fabulous ideas, and some got really imaginative about what they could see in the shape of their rocks. Xavier and Preston got very competitive and came up with over 40 ideas! Spent longer than planned as they all (eventually!) got really involved with this, then we had them each hold up their rock and explain their favourite re-imagining of it.

After our brief intro to the idea of FIFO life last week we got much deeper today. First, we showed them four quick YouTube Shorts made by FIFO miners showing aspects of their work and daily life, with a quick focus question each time, students were intrigued by the living conditions and the salaries! 

Then we talked about being inquisitive - being curious - and having lots of questions. From an example mind map we asked them in groups to brainstorm as many questions as they could about FIFO, hoping the videos had sparked some thinking. Again, took most groups a while to get started and results varied but on the whole, every group came up with some original questions (and some came up with many!). 

We had thought we may get on to the beginning of planning their project today but ran out of time so that will be for next week.

Time-restrictions (and we haven’t been able to source our pins for Tom’s great individual boards idea yet!) meant a brief reflection, but Tom (rightly) said they like being able to use his remote pointer to highlight an area of the board, so each group had a chance to do this from their seat and identify a key habit from the day. Most of them focused on imaginative, thinking most of the warm up, but we also talked about being collaborative and being inquisitive. As seems usual in the high school situations it takes a while for even the language of the habits to become familiar as we don’t have quite enough time to really go deep, but gradually they’re picking it up. 

So, next week will be introducing them to their projects - or getting them to decide what they will be - perhaps an example of something similar might help them to have a concrete vision of what they could produce. Tom also suggested introducing pet rocks might work well - definitely a good idea, and can use in warm up next week and incorporate into reflection time as well and possibly more. 

In general there’s a fair bit of interest in the FIFO topic, especially amongst those who have relatives who work/have worked FIFO. They’re enthusiastic about Creative Schools so we will capitalise on that! They do work better with fairly significant help to get started, examples are not enough. 

I’ve been thinking I will see if I can get some real FIFO workers to answer some of their questions already for next week.

Amanda to investigate sourcing some pet rocks!
Tom to sort creative habits wheels.

Three teams in a line. The three at the front of the line are given a word/ action eg swimming, elephant, tennis, and then they pass it down the line one by one. Person at the end once shown needs to keep what they think the answer is quiet until the big reveal, was it passed down? Did we pass it down differently but come to the same answer? 

Box mountain installation formation: working out the maths. Need 11.5m3 of boxes to equal to our current cumulative clothing collection. 

Each student measures the size of their box/boxes 

We tally up the maths of the whole thing, do we have enough boxes?

We stopped at 3 million cm 3 and they potentially will keep working on it through the week. 

Commissioned them all as now mural artists. This is your building that needs to be painted. 

20 mins graffiti time decorating the boxes with what has impacted them so far/ what they have learnt. 

·      What has shocked you?

·      What has surprised you?

·      Learned so far? 

·      How does this make you feel? 

·      Any super words that you remember from last week?

·      Any further questions you have? 

Have a gallery walk around the mountain. 

Today we had a gallery walk around the boxes, and then moved our bunting triangles, interestingly now the students are wanting to have multiple habits chosen at the same time. 

Then they did some reflections in their journals and Vanessa, Jennie and I discussed the future ideas for the project. 

Was a great success, as always I struggled with the time limit and wanting to do more and more things taking time. But on the whole was a beautiful session. 

I did have one of the students after the session check with me if we were going to be measuring boxes next week and she looked relieved when I said no. So I think an element of this lesson had a big challenge to it as it was year 6 level maths working on volume! But they really rose to the challenge and I think the installation will be a great way to really show the scale of their clothing collection, and perhaps lead to questioning and reflection amongst the wider community on their clothing collections. 

Next session;

• Maybe filming with the boxes? What we missed today? 

• And then starting to make their films with their groups. 

• Potentially some of the students making the music? 

• OR Overalls? Have a shift of focus/ have a break from the boxes and filming.. 

• Overalls (Jennie) 

• Patches of fabric for the patches and decorations. Remida?/ clothing already collected? 

• Buttons? Remida? 

• Maybe they could plan a clothes swap? 

• …lots of ideas, will have a bit of a think about next week and the remaining weeks of the term we have left. 

Jennie is presenting to the staff tomorrow. 

Getting into Groups - imaginative, collaboration, persistence, discipline

1. You will each be given a feeling. Remember your feeling (think seven dwarfs - happy, sad, grumpy, shy, sleepy)(5 minutes)

2. Head count 1 - 5 so that there are 5 groups in total

3. Set a timer to see how quickly you are able to do this

4. Without words, how can you find your group?

Continue Making 3D Creatures

1. What is the difference between 3 dimensional and 2 dimensional?

2. Continue creating your creature

3. Draw your creature and write down which creative habit super power it has. 

4. What else could you add to your drawing to identify its super power?

Share your creature’s creative habit. 

1. What is it and how does your creature use this habit?

Next?

1. What could you do with your creatures now?

2. How could you share your creations with people outside of the classroom? Outside of the school?

Which creative habit did you use today?

1. Which coloured paper corresponds to the creative habit you feel you used most today?

2. Discuss with a partner why you chose that colour

3. How can you attach this to your flower to begin your Creative Habits flower garden. Will you stick it flat, roll it up, overlap it or do you have another idea?

4. Attach your paper to your flower, cut it out and have it ready to add to the garden.

Successes

• They were more tidy in the classroom today and took responsibility in keeping their work on the tables and cleaning up afterwards displaying a lot of discipline

• The student who missed last week has had a difficult week this week but today she was fully engaged which Katy (teacher) said was a big thing for her. 

• Ownership in directing the project. They were able to come up with the idea of sharing their characters by having them interact with each other to demonstrate their creative habit and filming this. They also suggested four people in each group - 2 puppeteers, 1 videographer and 1 sound person for special sound effects

• Remembering the creative habits even though the meanings of some of them they still don’t quite understand.

• We forgot crunch and sip today because students worked right through

• They came up with different ways of getting into groups including facial expressions and for one group, writing it on a white board

Challenges

• Forgetting crunch and sip meant that towards the end of the session some of the students got tired and transitioned from green to blue (zone of regulation)

• Preference for working with friends rather than with people they are less familiar with. They did however, come up with some really good reasons for working with friends including being themselves and teamwork.

Giving students space to decide where they would like the project to go is keeping them engaged even when we have already had similar ideas. Answering questions with questions is resulting in them coming up with the answers or turning to each other. They are coming up with interesting examples for creative habits including,

‘My creature is a spider and he is persistent because he always wants to write and he has to keep trying’.

Working in groups of 4 - choose a friend and then form a group with another pair who you wouldn’t normally work with. 

Planning what their interaction is going to be between their characters, what they will say, where they want to film and what sound effects they would like to include. 

Create a 2 minute video interaction between their creatures. (This is a much better idea than the 20 minutes that they initially suggested!)

Tea bag game - sit in 2 groups, pass the tea round and suggest exciting ways to sell me a tea bag!

Making a clay prototype! 

To testing the market before investing in real materials/time. Students created a prototype of their food fusion. This is a part of the design process and a real life skill they need to learn. They will be able to reflect on their results from the market day which is really a simulation "a safe testing ground... for experimental ideas" so they don't loose real money and only gain real experience.

They placed their food on paper plates/cups/patty cases while its drying. They looked amazing!

Today they choose 2 coins?  One for the warm up and one for the main activity

They write what 2 habits they used the most in class.

Amazing lesson! They looked so delicious! 

9 students had choir today, so missed half of the lesson, they had to work super hard to catch up.

They need paint their food next.

How are the posters looking, do we photograph the food next week and insert the photo into their posters?

Then they need to make signs and think about table decorations.

Do we work out the maths after they have sold them?

Acrylic paint, brushes  and PVA glue and posca pens. 

Creative Tableaus: I've used this activity in previous years, but I found it was a little messy to organise and manage this time around. It could have been the rain, or my strained voice (I was presenting to 60 year 9s yesterday, for 5 hours), but it took the students a while to create their tableaus. It certainly warmed them up, at least...

VOX POP interviews: students were to choose a policy developed in last week's class, devise 5 or more questions they could ask their peers (in a VOX POP style) that would be open-ended and potentially get answers that support their chosen policy, and then film/audio record a peer in the VOX POP style as they answer the questions.

This activity took a little while to get started, but once the students understood their task they dove right into it. We let them film or record audio for this activity, and they worked away at this for the majority of the session, playing with filming and asking the questions. We did a review session afterwards, and explored why the students weren't always receiving the answers they had hoped for, whether it was due to the person the were asking, or the way they asked it. This will be useful info for them when developing other aspects of their political marketing campaign.

The secret history of “their drawings”. Borrowing an example from the creative reflection journal, I ran the students through a similar activity that brought back their drawings from last session. I wanted this activity to get them thinking about backstories, assumptions and personas of people or characters, but we had a busy session otherwise, so we decided to let them free flow with this reflection, mostly just chatting away about wildly creative and quirky backstories for the characters they drew.

This session was a little off the books, trying the students out with a bit of media work that could tie in with their overarching project. Very few of them had heard of VOX POP filming before, so there was a learning curve to that, but it was valuable to give them a unique cross-curricular task, and they seemed to enjoy the opportunity to mess around with the camera app on the ipads and film each other. The class discussion afterwards was valuable, as many of the students began realising how hard it is to design questions that actually get you the answer you want.

The students seemed to enjoy the more autonomous structure of the main activity. After they had been setup with the task and their groups they went right ahead with it all, experimenting with the questions they had devised, and filming the other group answering said questions. There was plenty of discussion around which policies worked better than others, during interviews and outside.

While the majority of students enjoy high energy activities, some of them seemed a bit outcast during this session - unwilling to be as outgoing with this activity as their peers. This was especially evident during the warmup activity. Future sessions will return to more diverse activity options.

With half the term left, we will also properly dive into preparing for the mock election. We have loosely planned out the next 5 sessions in the following order; posters, speeches, video content, mock election, counting up and review.

Sample political advertising posters (just pictures on the google slides, most likely), so the students have some references to work from. Will work out more as we go throughout the week.

Questions and interviews were saved to the class ipads, so these can be extracted and collated for showcases later on.

Drawing Creatures - Working with a partner

1. Choose a partner who you wouldn’t normally work with

2. Sit back to back with your partner

3. Explain how to draw your creature using only descriptive words like shapes and lines but not any nouns.

Eg: draw an oval in the middle of the page, draw to straight lines from the bottom of the oval. You cannot say draw straight lines like legs

1. Take it in turns to give each other an instruction or you can each complete a drawing and then swap places

The Plan

1. Find a pair who you think are very different to you. 

2. In your group of four, get your creatures and discuss how you could do a play about your characters and how they use their creative habits.

3. How many characters will be in your video?

4. How could you introduce your characters. Do they have names?

5. How can you explain your creative habit superpower/strength to the other character?

6. Where would you like to film

7. Draw it like a comic, in four panels - introducing each other, problem, creative habit, solution

Extending creative habits

1. What creative habit did you use most today? 

2. Did you use more than one and if so, how?

3. Create your creative habit flower and add a zone of regulation leaf.

Successes

• It worked well when we were practicing outside because we finished really quickly ... Oli

• Use of reflection flowers and how they are applying colours to show how much of each creative habit they felt they used

• Group work was positive particularly as they had to choose someone they didn't usually work with and then partner with another pair to create a mixed group of boys and girls

• Jack B bounced back really quickly which is unusual for him as he would normally cry. Displaying more resilience.

• Use of props outside

Challenges

• Working outside for one group was difficult and they didn't achieve anything. This did enable us to talk about Creative habit use during reflection.

• Extended focus and attention is still difficult at times

• The main activity was much less open ended with the inclusion of the story arc

This is good though as I can go back to this process when we do narratives at the end of the year … Teacher

Ongoing reflection throughout the sessions is engaging students, particularly using actions and creative habits as an ‘attention grab’ in conjunction with clapping rhythms. They still require further understanding of the meaning for each habit as they tend to read from the poster. Getting students to share examples of how they think they are using each habit is helping those who are still struggling and enabling students to extend their thinking. A number of them are able to incorporate multiple habit use in activities.  

I was inquisitive because I was questioning how the group could draw their characters and what they would do and I was collaborative working with my group… student

I mixed the cookies together to show how much I did if each of the creative habits - student

They are looking forward to using the Ipads to film however we are curious to see how they are able to apply the parameters of using one take and not moving the camera.

Getting into Groups - imaginative, collaboration, persistence, discipline

1. You will each be given a feeling. Remember your feeling (think seven dwarfs - happy, sad, grumpy, shy, sleepy)(5 minutes)

2. Head count 1 - 5 so that there are 5 groups in total

3. Set a timer to see how quickly you are able to do this

4. Without words, how can you find your group?

Continue Making 3D Creatures

1. What is the difference between 3 dimensional and 2 dimensional?

2. Continue creating your creature

3. Draw your creature and write down which creative habit super power it has. 

4. What else could you add to your drawing to identify its super power?

Share your creature’s creative habit. 

1. What is it and how does your creature use this habit?

Next?

1. What could you do with your creatures now?

2. How could you share your creations with people outside of the classroom? Outside of the school?

Which creative habit did you use today?

1. Which coloured paper corresponds to the creative habit you feel you used most today?

2. Discuss with a partner why you chose that colour

3. How can you attach this to your flower to begin your Creative Habits flower garden. Will you stick it flat, roll it up, overlap it or do you have another idea?

4. Attach your paper to your flower, cut it out and have it ready to add to the garden.

Successes

• They were more tidy in the classroom today and took responsibility in keeping their work on the tables and cleaning up afterwards displaying a lot of discipline

• The student who missed last week has had a difficult week this week but today she was fully engaged which Katy (teacher) said was a big thing for her. 

• Ownership in directing the project. They were able to come up with the idea of sharing their characters by having them interact with each other to demonstrate their creative habit and filming this. They also suggested four people in each group - 2 puppeteers, 1 videographer and 1 sound person for special sound effects

• Remembering the creative habits even though the meanings of some of them they still don’t quite understand.

• We forgot crunch and sip today because students worked right through

• They came up with different ways of getting into groups including facial expressions and for one group, writing it on a white board

Challenges

• Forgetting crunch and sip meant that towards the end of the session some of the students got tired and transitioned from green to blue (zone of regulation)

• Preference for working with friends rather than with people they are less familiar with. They did however, come up with some really good reasons for working with friends including being themselves and teamwork.

Giving students space to decide where they would like the project to go is keeping them engaged even when we have already had similar ideas. Answering questions with questions is resulting in them coming up with the answers or turning to each other. They are coming up with interesting examples for creative habits including,

‘My creature is a spider and he is persistent because he always wants to write and he has to keep trying’.