Back Drawing - A classic drawing guessing game! Students pair up and get one piece of paper each. The first student turns away from the second, while the second places the paper on the back of the first student. The second student must choose an object that both they and the first student can see, then draw it on the paper, ensuring that the first student can feel the pen/pencil as it draws. The first student must try to guess what the second student is drawing. Minimal clues are allowed, with the second student staying mostly silent for the entire process. Once the first student guesses, roles are reversed.

The students seemed to really enjoy this, with only a modicum of difficulty. We had to allow more and more clues for some students, while other students swapped multiple times during the time we had for this warmup.

Persuasive Poster Designing - with previous sessions being somewhat more structured, we wanted this main activity to be much more student led, with us giving them the general task required, and them being able to work away most of the rest of the session on their own. We gave them a quick intro (reminder, since they’ve already done persuasive posters before) to the elements of a persuasive poster, then handed out the drawings they made in a previous session. They had to use the drawing as their ‘political party figure’ who stood for their chosen policy, then draw it all in on their poster.

Apparently many of the students were working on these in the following mornings after this session - wonderful feedback!

We brought back the creative elections for this sessions reflection activity. I decided it had been long enough since their last vote, so we tried it again to see how the results differed. While the actual votes didn’t change too much since last time, the discussions around it, and the student response, was much more constructive - they understood more what they were voting for this time!

We found this more fluid approach to the main task to work really well. The more independent students were happy to work on their posters with minimal guidance, while this freed us up to help out the students who needed it.

The students are enjoying the personal angle we’re taking with our exploration of politics curriculum, using these policies that they came up with and allowing them to figure out all the benefits and challenges with campaigning for them, and implementing them.

We’re in Stage 1 of the three stage buildup towards our election, planned for session 8. Next week will be persuasive speeches. Students will choose a policy to write and record a persuasive speech supporting their policy. 

In line with keeping our resource requirements low, next week will only need basic paper for our creative cubby building reflection activity.

These posters will be displayed in the voting hall (a classroom at the school that we designate as the voting room) in session 8, so there will be plenty of opportunities for the school community (particularly those we have chosen to vote) to see the work in our class.

One Word at a Time - A classic drama warmup activity, where students must tell a story as a whole class, but each individual is allowed to say only one word at a time. We started by asking the students to provide a character, setting, and goal, then let them build the story from there.

They loved this and never wanted to stop, but it really got them thinking about slowing down and considering the story they were telling, and choosing their words carefully - all themes relevant to their main activity for this session.

Persuasive Speech Writing and Recording - students chose a partner to work with, then a policy to support. They had to write up a 1-3 minute speech to convince viewers that this policy is worth their vote. They had to consider who their audience might be, how this policy benefits them, who else the policy could benefit, and include persuasive language and a call to action for their speech. Lastly, they had to ensure all students in their group contributed to the audio of the final video, whether through sharing the speaking role or adding their voice to the recording in some other way (one example was some students used a call and response style; “when do we want it?! NOW!!”. We started this outside at the yarning circle (same location as the warmup activity) then let the students break off and film/record their speeches around the whole outdoor area.

This was an opportunity to call back to the VOX POP activity from a few weeks ago, but with a reversed purpose - now the students were filming themselves in their group, and had to plan out the content of their video more closely (it was still a pretty loose plan, considering the relatively short time they had to write and record for this activity).

Creative Cubby Building - this was a new idea that popped into my mind later during the week, so I didn’t plan it out as well as I had wanted, but the potential of it should be great. Students must choose four words to describe their recent creative schools session, or their day in general (including the creative habits) and write them onto a paper brick they construct. The process goes like this;

• 1 A4 paper is given to two students, and they fold it in half (top to bottom, portrait, ruling out two tall rectangles). They then measure out five rectangles (as even as possible) across the page, ensuring both tall rectangles have five smaller rectangles inside them (I’ll have a photo of these for next week). They then cut out the middle fold, and each student gets one of the tall rectangles.

• Write one word (or draw a picture to represent that word) inside four of the rectangles, leaving a top or bottom one blank (this will get glued to another face of the shape later on)

• Colour in the rectangles, or add illustrations, referencing the colour of the creative habit the student believed they used the most.

• With the illustrated/coloured faces on the outside, students must fold their tall rectangle paper strips inwards, then glue down a face to create a rectangular prism (two sides will be open, but this is intentional, to simplify the construction process and provide easy handles).

The overarching plan with this is that we will conduct this activity each week, and construct a big cubby out of all the bricks from each week!

Unfortunately for this week, my explanation of the activity was lacking (some of the construction instructions were made up on the fly too - thanks Kirsti!) There were various struggles with the activity, so I plan to film a short video of me making one for the students to use as reference.

The students had already done some work with persuasive speeches, so they weren’t too unfamiliar with what was required of them for this session. We plan to use the recordings they made during this session for the video making session the following week, which should help reduce workload for what can be quite a hefty task (filmmaking).

The students are still on board with the policy explorations, remaining motivated to come up with reasons why their school needs them. It will be interesting to see how the vote goes in a few weeks.

Mostly just making better instructions for the reflection activity, the Creative Cubby Building.

Nothing for next week, but the following week, the mock election, will need more planning in place.

The mock election will connect our class program with the neighbouring creative schools class, a group of younger students, and a selection of teachers/staff.