Creative Schools 2025

1. Find your group from last week. These are your party members

2. Come up with a name for your party based on your common ideas

3. Allocate one of the following job descriptions to each member

• Party Leader - speech writer and presenter

• Campaign Manager - organiser of campaign plan

• Media Consultant - marketing materials

• Treasurer - allocation of funding

• Policy Advisor - fact or fiction?

1. If you had to come up with a slogan/catch phrase/logo for your party, what would it be?

2. What is your party’s political values? What does your party stand for? Consider how you can connect with voters. Who are you representing? Remember that a political party is an organisation that represents a particular group of people or set of ideas. 

3. Create your party’s constitution? Include the following: What we value. Who has which powers. Who has which responsibilities. What our rights are. How we resolve disagreements. (This could be displayed in the classroom and referred to when making decisions)

4. Your challenge for each party is to come up with a policy for each of the following:-

Education, Community, Healthcare, Childcare, Cost of Living, Housing, Climate, Other

1. Expand on your policies - How would you implement each one? How would you pay for it?

These tasks can roll over into future sessions.

Q and A (allow extra time for this)

1. Get into three even lines at the back of the room

2. The challenge is for each person from each group to write a question into the ‘question’ column’ on the board about something you didn’t understand from today’s content/session.  

3. The group that is able to answer each question first, is first to leave

Successes

• Engagement and involvement, even from the group where each student generally refrains from doing anything. Having them in the same group means that someone has to do something

• They seem to have fun particularly relative to a regular lesson with workbooks and writing…Prac Teacher

• Group work without text books

• Ability to go back to content from previous sessions such as determining what a right and a responsibility was. They were able to look at the brainstorming activity from session 1

• Questions during reflection being able to tell use what content students were unsure about

Challenges

• Understanding and recalling the meaning for some of the terms - constitution, policy

• Missing weekly session due to assessments and other activities

• Relief and prac teacher so we couldn’t find the election campaign flyers to refer to

They are engaged with the making of their political parties but didn’t immediately understand that they can form and design their party so that it is specifically relevant to them, it doesn’t need to replicate an existing party. Although some of the basic descriptions for terms were on the board, it would be beneficial for the terminology and definitions to be displayed somewhere for students to refer back to each time they are in the class. Their understanding of the terminology is slowly emerging and they are showing interest in being able to design a party and policies that relate the their interests and age group. 

How do I feel, in a move. Close your eyes, think of how you feel, and then think of how you could show me that in a move. Then we go around and try on everyone’s emotion. Also looking at each other’s and being honest of how we are feeling and considering how you could support those who maybe look like they need it. Then maybe have a dance party with everyone dancing their own emotion? If you see someone and think, actually…I want to try on theirs, go for it. Then maybe see if they can do it fast, then slow does that change how it feels? 

Box mountain filming

We managed a ⅓ of the size of 11m3 for our box tower. We today worked more on the words component/ rhetorical questions we had/ super words. 

 Before heading outside, they all grabbed a whiteboard and wrote a rhetorical question or word that they would like to have on the whiteboard for their moment to ‘speak’. 

We went outside and played with some different ways of filming each other and the boxes, really thinking about the message we are wanting to share. 

We came inside, and after the bunting triangles they reflected on where they would like that video to be shown, what would they like to see happen as a result of people seeing this video. 

I personally found this session quite confronting and sad.. Seeing their questions and reflecting on the bigger problem at large, I found it pretty sad. So I tried to make a point of sharing how this week was the last week kind of exploring what this issue is and what we think about it, and how I was excited to see all their creative ideas that they have already had start to present exciting ways we can take action and do something about it. 

Jennie has mentioned how they are all really excited about the video, and at the fact that others are going to see it. Tremendously excited to see them fully engage in next weeks activity of jazzing up some overalls for their latest client - Ms Richardson.

Overalls jazzing up session; 

• Students will decide on either a theme or just general likes of Ms Richardson

• They will design their own design to add to the overalls, and then in groups will choose location and fabrics to start going ahead with making them! Including learning to stitch, use fabric glue and cut out shapes. 

• Fabrics- already sourced

• Overalls- secondhand already sourced

• Fabric glue- already sourced.

• Needles and maybe thread?- Tanya (REmida?)

They are very excited to share their videos. Lots of them suggested we send it to netflix, others wanted us to send it to environmental activists. There is a lot of excitement to share this with community and they don’t even know about the stall yet. 

We had some more chats with teachers passing by today because we had this massive box sculpture. Also Jennie presented to the staff last friday and that went well. 

Object Transformation - Pass an ordinary object around the circle. Each student must accept what the previous student said the object was and transform it into something new, saying "Yes, it's a ___, and it's also a ___."

Highlights were: elements of a telescope, a gun in its holster, a wig, a skullcap.

Food drive poster design and pop up studio photography of fruit and veges brought in by students (these will feed into our algebraic representation next week)

• Add sand from today’s creative habits 

• Imaginative, collaborative, imaginative

Challenges have been shifting plans around cooking as our art form.

We have pivoted to finish the posters earlier to fit the schools suggested advertising date. Week 7 will be a session that straddles completing the poster (even though some will already be up around the school) and making.
If working with digital systems how to avoid them using templates. Can just say not allowed to use.  

We discussed more intricately integrating curriculum elements into the activities. We will try and do this better in advance in term 3 and will trial sharing class plans so the activities can be designed at exactly the right level and with stronger connection to curriculum.

Students seemed to enjoy the design task of today and the photography, they got really playful with the “food styling” adding hats and ribbons to adorn the fruit and veges.

Finalise the poster, this work also feeds into the video. Hand draw some titles? Extend on the digital creative work. 

Andrea to send photos from today’s studio to Jasmine for student access in Canva for next week.

Jasmine meeting with the school admin to finalise session 8 incursion. May need to shift to week 9 but that is fine with Andrea’s timetable.

School facebook 

Compass (intranet) to raise awareness with families 

Andrea and Jasmine to share photos with each other via google drive 

Tom had a last-minute PL on Wednesday so we needed to move our session to last thing Friday which we know isn’t the best time for getting this class’s attention! With this in mind we made it very hands on, starting with getting to know their pet rocks for this rocks and minerals topic - asked them to choose their rock then ‘meditate’, contemplating their rock for a couple of minutes, before they could get Sharpies to decide how to personalise and name their rocks. Some gorgeous outcomes, and everyone engaged.

Tried to fit in two parts here (I know it was Friday and in hindsight this would never work). Ideally, we would have some of the students working with our airdry clay making pebbles we can use for future reflections - in creative habit colours - while others worked on video questions. We managed to get the pebbles created (more or less!), but only some groups started to decide what questions they would record. We have recruited a few FIFO workers via TikTok who are happy to respond (privately not on Tiktok) to students’ video-recorded questions on FIFO, so next session we will continue to get these recorded and then plan how we’ll incorporate other “must knows” students have into our final project outcome.

Tom led this with the Creative Habits wheel on the board, students are getting the hang of this (except for “disciplined”, always tricky as they make assumptions!). He’s got the pins/arrows ready for individual wheels for next time too.

Today’s planning was still too ambitious for a Friday afternoon, last lesson session, so we have half of it ready to continue next week, when we’ll have students record their questions (I’ll bring their brainstormed questions from last week).

They really enjoy anything that’s hands on, but I think some (not all!) are also intrigued by being able to ask real people some of their FIFO questions. They enjoy Creative Schools sessions, so that’s something!

Hopefully we can, once we have the video answers, get the students to consider how we can present this information as a class, and what else we need to add to give us a full picture of FIFO life.

Since we have some extra time I’ll contact a few more FIFO content creators.

Will bring student brainstorms next week to get them to choose their questions more easily.

Pebbles are drying at school, will bring a good jar for us to use to show both creative habits and sedimentary layers!

1. “If fractions were animals, what would they be—and why?”

2. Write or draw your metaphor (e.g. “A fraction is like a chameleon because it can look different but be the same value.”)

Prompts:

• “Decimals are like…”

• “Numbers are like…”

• “Letters are like…”

Visualisation of food scarcity activity

1. Work in your rows

2. Choose ONE problem from the table below and calculate x

1. Make a visualisation in Canva of your selected problem (no templates allowed, use your imaginations!)

1. Use the photos we took last week  

2. What visual properties might we use?

• Scale

• Quantity (number of fruit/veges)

• Spatial relationship (where the fruits/veges are in relation to one another)

• Colour

4.  Share the editable file/link with Ms Ritchie!

Added sand from today’s creative habits 5 min - imagination, inquisitiveness, collaboration. 

The ones whose challenges in the class are not academic creative activities are a bridge to engage more.

For those who have behavioural challenges, the loss of structure means he does nothing. Need to find ways to integrate structure. E.g., work with the person next to you. Or short achievable goals, different amount to others, more regularly. 

They enjoyed manipulating things, enjoyed seeing the product of the previous week’s photos. 

One Note, we will share the handouts and chunk them for the individual levels of students. 

I.e. Here is the page for everyone, includes smaller steps, then have a separate document with extensions for advanced students.   

Next session sound based, a third type of representation (after tactile (rice/lentils) & images of food).

Andrea to provide recorder and microphone for next week. Nothing else needed. 

School facebook 

Compass (intranet) to raise awareness with families 

Andrea and Jasmine to share photos with each other via google drive 

We got students to find their pet rock (we’d collected last week), and gave students who weren’t there last week a moment to create their own. They were then asked to work with their partner and interview each other’s rocks, like a podcaster. Some students engaged really well and had some fun conversations, others tried to ask “rock” questions only, and a few didn’t quite engage, but it was nice to see that the students do really like their rocks!!

We distributed the students’ FIFO life question brainstorms from a fortnight ago, and asked them to decide on 2 or 3 questions they wanted to video to send up to our FIFO people to answer. We had hoped some students would film themselves on their iPads (not all students have a device) but it proved harder to get them to take this responsibility than we’d hoped, so I ended up taking a group at a time into a nearby empty lab to record, and Tom recorded a couple of students as well while herding the rest (great job!). The engagement was varied and some were worried about being filmed or the public speaking part of it but most overcame this, some decided they didn’t want to be filmed but would speak over us filming their rocks (great idea!). Questions were really interesting and lots of variety so the answers should be enlightening.

We used the pebbles in the creative habits colours which the students created last week and asked about which habit they had used most today. The main answer was being collaborative as both our activities involved a lot of this today (and they by and large collaborated really well), so a bunch of students added a purple pebble to our beaker. Tom and I added a green pebble each for our persistence in dealing with difficulty ;) Over the next few weeks we hope that some of our reflections will lead to some layers like the sedimentary rocks we have discussed!

Tom sensibly suggested we do our next step with our FIFO people videos in a fortnight rather than next week to leave enough time for more videos to return to us, so Week 9 will be students compiling this and reflecting on what they have learnt - what’s not what they expected etc. Next week we will interrupt FIFO to look at the layers of earth part of the curriculum.

Tom said he’s really happy to see the students so engaged, that they might sometimes be loud (which doesn’t bother either of us!) but it’s “loud engaged”, which is more engaged than with more regular lessons. 

We had a chat about some ideas for the layers lesson but agreed to ponder further before Wednesday and be in touch. I’ll also trim our student videos and distribute to the FIFO people we’ve contacted.

Trust - collaboration, discipline, persistence, imagination (best done outside)

1. Stand opposite a partner who is the same height as you

2. Place your palms together with your partner

3. How far can you move your feet backwards while still pressing up against your partner’s palms?

Recording

1. Get into your filming groups of 4 (1 group of 5)

2. Each group will be provided with an ipad and instructions on how to set up the ipad, record and watch the recording

3. Your Creative Habits play must have

• A location where the ipad can be placed without moving

• Introduction of characters - this can be by using names during the filming or you could do it like a movie does creating a title page and character names

• A time of at least 60 seconds but not longer than 2 minutes

• Follow the story mountain - introduction, problem, solution

• Include the use of a creative habit

1. Watch each of the videos (it doesn’t have to be finished). What is one thing you liked and two things that could make it even better?

Make a flower for someone else

1. Choose someone in your group

2. What creative habit do you think they used the most today and how

3. Make them a flower that represents this

Successes 

• Doing activities over two weeks is giving the students the opportunity to reflect on what succeeds and what would make it better, and then implement discipline and persistence in the second session

• Aleesha answered questions and made suggestions for improving some of the videos. This is the first time she has given any feedback in class and she put her hand up to do it. 

• Michael was able to wait until a discussion was finished before taking a break. This is the first time he has been able to implement that strategy.

• Collaborating in their groups is being achieved really well. One group only had 2 people today but this gave them the opportunity to work together successfully and problem solve, something that was more difficult for the group last week when there was 4 people

Challenges

• They are so excited sometimes it is difficult for them to stop and listen to eachother

Francis is using his creative habits and made himself a pencil case out of paper which he was excited to show. Ava made a game during her 10 minutes of free time because she realised that her partner was in the same creative group as her so she decided to use her creative habits to design a game. Doing a reflection for someone else, although not completely successful for everyone, did give them the opportunity to consider another person and how they were displaying creative habits. Aleesha is attending school every Wednesday which is a big change to her very low attendance. When she is at school, she wears either a oodie or a oversized jumper that she retreats into. Today we noticed that when she was comfortable, the jumper would come off to reveal her school uniform. It seems that this could be signifying how she is feeling in herself. Each time she actively wanted to participate in something, even giving feedback or coming and sitting with me and having a conversation about colours and creative habits, the jumper was removed.

They are showing more persistence in their attempts in their school work. Even in assessments yesterday, they continued to try even when it was difficult… Katy (Teacher)

I did Audrey’s reflection and I chose all of the creative habits because she was doing them all …Ava

My puppet show was the most successful because I didn’t think we would finish it and that people would like it … Francis

Making the videos is good because it’s fun and you get to think about what you can do …Aleesha

The puppet show was the most challenging because it was hard to guide people to do their roles … Francis

Trying to do the filming was hard because everyone kept putting their hands and feet in … Aleesha

Coloured poska pens were handed out, the students had to swap colours to get ones that matched and then working as one big group they had to lay them out to make a cohesive colour wheel.

This week we created "mini-mascots" of the new characters we had designed from the book. The students were given mascot foam to sculpt a 3D character. This was super challenging for the class but within their grasp. We will continue next week.

Adding to our nature hanging reflections, using poska pens as well as thread this week.