Expanded Science at Friars Primary School and Nursery, Southend, Essex
Managed by the Royal Opera House since October 2008, Creative Partnerships in the Thames Gateway is working with over 100 schools across the region to deliver innovative, long-term partnerships between schools and creative professionals. The Creative Partnerships programme helps schools look at different ways of growing creativity and delivering the curriculum through creative teaching and learning techniques, working across subject and year groups and encouraging parents to get involved.
It brings in people such as film makers, dancers, graphic designers and sculptors, writers, actors, gardeners, painters, poets and photographers to inspire and work with staff, governors, parents and children. Royal Opera House - Creative Partnerships is now working with more than 100 artists in 110 schools across Essex and Hertfordshire, developing the skills of our future creative individuals. New and exciting opportunities for schools are being discovered as a result of the incorporation of the programme into the work of the Royal Opera House education department.
This case study is an excellent example of the way Royal Opera House – Creative Partnerships projects can bring together creativity and science, art and technology to illuminate a subject for children and open up new ways of thinking.
Enquiry Question – Can Investigation be Creative?
A programme of work linking artists with teachers to deliver the science curriculum, culminating in a pupil led Science Conference held at the school.
How our vision developed
This question was drawn directly from our School Improvement Plan that identified AT1, investigative thinking, in Science as an area for development. As a creative school we want to use our expertise to teach Science through creativity. We aim to develop children’s problem solving and creative thinking skills in order to approach Science and other curriculum areas with the same confidence and imagination that they display in the Arts.
The year groups involved in this project were Year 2 and Year 5 covering the curriculum areas of ‘Light and Sound’ and ‘Changing Materials’. Visual and sound artists Sam Belinfante and Richard Bevan were selected because of their expertise and artistic work that explores ideas that would support these units of study. Both were experienced in working with schools and community groups and were keen to work with Friars Primary School and Nursery to develop a bespoke project.
The project provided both teachers and artists with the opportunity to be alert and respond to the curiosity and a higher level questioning from the children. The creative cross-curricular approach to the delivery of Science ensured that artist and teacher could respond to questions from children and could use these ideas to develop an extension activity that could take place over an intensive burst of a few days.
This extension activity would aim to expand and extend the scientific ideas that the children had investigated during each unit of study.
So how did we deliver this vision?
During the first half term of work the artists worked with class teachers to co-deliver the timetabled science lessons.
The children in Year 2 participated in light and sound hunts around the school environment, with all children having the opportunity to use digital and Polaroid cameras to document their findings. This access to professional media in the exploration and development of their ideas contributed to the success of the project. For example, every pupil was allowed to use a Polaroid camera to take a single Polaroid picture of a light source in the school. The combination of the fact that this equipment was extremely special and the fact that individuals only had one shot meant that students were especially focused and produced work of a tremendously high standard. Students then labelled their photos and laid them out across the classroom floor. These photographs then became a resource for thinking about light; children ordered and reordered the images into different groups based upon criteria ranging from ‘brightest to darkest’ and ‘natural or man-made’.
With torches and further specialised photography equipment, in a blacked out room, the children investigated darkness as an absence of light. By gradually reducing the number of torches switched on and taking photographic imaging at each stage, the children could see the effects on the quality and brightness of each image.
Taking the activity outside, children became a human sound wave to create a visual image of its movement, allowing them to grapple with difficult concepts through physical and tactile engagement. They then had the opportunity to see a sound wave through a computer program connected to the interactive white board. All children thoroughly enjoyed each of these experiences and impressed the practitioners with their enthusiasm towards learning.
Year 5 had been learning about solids, liquids and gases. In exploring ways of creatively augmenting the teaching of the Year 5 science we discovered, as a team, that special technologies and media could be used to aid investigation and analysis, in particular close investigation through looking. By citing examples from popular culture such as Crime Scene Investigation and The Matrix, students were encouraged to think about ways in which new technology (particularly digital photography and video) could be used to enhance their own looking and thinking about the activities involved in the science curriculum. These videos and photographs were then used as resources to help communicate the students’ findings to each other as well as the rest of the school in the Science Conference. The children in Year 5 particularly enjoyed using video cameras to create documentaries of their experiments. Recording their own learning in this way provided many speaking and listening opportunities, and encouraged the children to discuss and record their understanding of the learning intentions in a new way.
This method of working has also been a beneficial assessment tool because much of it has been adult supervised therefore children are at ease to share their ideas and understanding. Through recording their work the children have also been able to look back at their experiments and assess or discuss any misconceptions they may have previously made. The use of the voiceover technique enabled the children to re-record their explanations and misconceptions once they had been addressed.
Artist Sam Belinfante was impressed by the students’ engagement with the digital media, commenting ‘the students showed excellent technical proficiency in the use of professional video camcorders. Children managed to edit their own videos quickly and efficiently as well as record and dub their own voiceovers and music tracks’.
The Light-Catcher
To consolidate the light and sound unit of science, the children created an animation inspired by a fictional newspaper article created by the artists, reporting that a light catcher was loose in Essex and making its way towards Shoeburyness (the location of our school). Our children delighted the artists by instantly playing along with the story, getting into role and telling of their own experiences of the light catcher. From this, groups of children created story boards and made scenery for the animation. Other groups used recording equipment to create the animation clips and sound-over. Children independently took their learning where they wanted it to go, each taking on roles within their group, becoming mini directors and producer.
Sam Belinfante observed that, ‘some of the more challenging children responded to being given positions of responsibility. The teams of video-makers in Year 2 were a superb example - jobs included holding the camera, holding the boom-microphones, moving the characters, asking questions and answering questions’. Richard Bevan was thrilled with how quickly the pupils became confident with the equipment, ‘one day near the end of filming the ‘Light Catcher’ Sam and I had a very short planning conversation, and by the time we turned around a group of 5 and 6 year olds had set-up a laptop with animation software and camera and were patiently waiting for us to move out of the way of their shot. To conclude the animation we set up an interview scenario where pupils asked each other about their experiences of the light catcher. It was amusing to see staff at the school having to look twice at a year two pupil holding a boom microphone and another controlling a camera and tripod’.
The Science Conference
As the culmination of the six weeks of collaborative planning and delivery of creative science investigations we decided to develop a science conference which would be led by the Year 5 children and experienced by the children in Year 2. Held in the school hall, with the room arranged in a traditional conference style, the Year 5 pupils presented their digital documentation of their experiments and led ‘mini-lessons’ for Year 2. The conference also provided the perfect opportunity for the Year 2 children to premiere their animation, ‘The Light Catcher’.
Richard Bevan explained how the conference demonstrated the pupils’ increased confidence and enthusiasm for the subject, ‘both groups of children seemed to gain confidence in having input into the lesson over the duration of the project and this was particularly noticeable by the time we got the Science Conference. There was about 30 minutes during the conference where the Year 5 children were presenting mini-lessons to the Year 2 children and I really felt that all of us adults could have left the room and everything would have just had carried on, we were simply standing in the middle looking amazed!’
The consolidation of the learning for both year groups has also allowed for strong cross curricular links. The children in Year 2 made character profiles of the mysterious light catcher allowing links with imaginative and descriptive writing, use of adjectives and creating wanted posters. For Year 5 links have been made with ICT, Art, Literacy, Drama and Numeracy skills.
Collaboration
The project’s success is based upon a true and honest collaboration between teachers, artists and pupils, to ensure that the Richard and Sam were able to add value to the work already taking place which has been extremely important for both artists;
‘from a practitioner’s perspective working with Friar’s has been one of the most exciting and educational projects (for myself as well as the children!) that I have ever been involved with. Right from the start we were welcomed into the school and the project was built around a collaboration between ourselves, Rebecca Birch, Royal Opera House - Creative Partnerships Creative Agent and the staff at the school. We structured our science lessons based around their curriculum and learning objectives, but introducing elements that related to our own artistic practices. The Year 2s project ‘light and sound’ fitted very well with my own and Sam’s studio work, where as the Year 5s ‘solids, liquids and gasses’ was initially much more of a challenge. This was partly due to the fact that the class teachers were already doing very exciting and creative projects without any input from us. We eventually focused on creative documentation with the Year 5s using video, sound, animation, drawing and photography. I do honestly think the reason this project was such a success was the thorough collaboration between us, the staff and the children. We were only in the school for 12 days in total and we really felt like part of the place by the end of the project’. Richard Bevan
‘As the project went on students took increasing control of their learning until, in the extension project, the children were running the whole thing. The Year 2s in the extension project, for example, could use animation in anyway that they saw fit to build the light-catcher story- this ranged from small and intricate drawn animations to life-size stop-frame animations across the school. The pairing of myself and Richard Bevan was an extremely good one, we brought the best out of each other. We naturally led on different areas of the project and our different personalities combined to be extremely effective in the classroom environment. Our own expertise in sound and light in a variety of media meant that we felt extremely well equipped to help develop and deliver the project. Students began to call us ‘Professors Sam and Richard’- this allowed for an extremely enabling position outside of the accepted teacher and pupil hierarchy. This meant that we could take the students outside and beyond the everyday whilst maintaining trust and respect. The teachers were extremely good at aiding with discipline, they supported our need for a fun and relaxed environment whilst helping us control difficult behaviour by both administering discipline themselves and by supporting our own’. Sam Belinfante
Our Future Vision
Our vision for the future is to build an interactive Science Dome in the school grounds. The dome would be used as a permanent outdoor classroom for children to explore science through hands on investigations using resources that have been created through the final art projects that children have led to consolidate their previously taught units of work. Examples of work displayed may be, investigations explored by children during the science conference, the animation created by children in Year 2, video evidence taken during the science conference and any other resources that have been created, brought in through the project budget and donations from supporting practitioners.
Shampa Sengupta, Creative Programmer for Royal Opera House - Creative Partnerships is full of enthusiasm for this type of work:
"This project is a wonderful example of the fantastic work that can be done through fostering innovative, long-term partnerships between schools and creative professionals. It open up opportunities to teach core curriculum subject (maths, the sciences and history) by “disguising” them and enables the children to learn by doing. Children can suddenly gain a passion for subject they thought they hated and you won’t hear them asking ‘but when will I very use this in real life’."
The practitioners on this project were Richard Bevan and Sam Belinfante
More information about the work of Royal Opera House - Creative Partnerships can be found at www.creative-partnerships.com
By Louise Coates, Sarah Wallace & Rebecca Birch