Alien Encounters at Twickenham Primary School?

Bright Space - Birmingham, Herefordshire and Worcestershire

Twickenham Primary School is a Creative Partnerships Change School based in Birmingham. They wanted to look at introducing whole school focus weeks from Nursery to Year 6. This would enable the school to concentrate on a specific themed project that would cover a host of curriculum areas including maths, literacy, and speaking and listening amongst others.

Project objectives

The main objective of the Twickenham School project was to enhance engagement, motivation and achievement for pupils. This would then inspire creative thinking, leading to accelerated learning and high levels of enjoyment for pupils. Teachers would further develop their planning, implementation and evaluation skills of creative teaching.

The focus week centred on an imaginary ‘being’, that landed in the school over the previous weekend. Clues and messages were left across the school including ‘pink goo’, a cordoned off mock-up landing in the playground with ‘spaceship’ bits strewn across, and a suspicious large egg. This all added to the fantasy theme.

Each class worked on an element of the project’s fantasy world and fantasy ‘alien’, to try to discover who and what this ‘thing’ was, working with different creative practitioners to explore further. Nursery classes worked with a visual artist in felt-making and animation inspired by the fantasy theme. Reception worked with an artist looking at building 3D rockets, fantasy food, gifts and ‘monster’ masks.

Year 1 worked on a large scale 3D sculpture creating a fantasy form of transport. They also explored messages in a cryptic code which came from the ‘alien’. Year 2 worked with a dance and movement artist using light and shadow to explore the movements and shapes of creatures from the fantasy world. Year 3 decoded Morse code messages written on their walls and wrote replies. They also made ‘junk’ instruments so that they could communicate with the ‘alien’ which supported their sound science topic.

Year 4 explored and observed the school grounds, re-imagining them as a secret hidden fantasy world, working with ICT to make animated characters and films. Year 5 documented the events and activities of the week, reporting their findings from their mock TV studio, sharing it with their peers via the project blog. Year 6 worked on designing mythical creatures using photo montage and built environments for them to inhabit.

The children shared their experiences with their peers and parents in assemblies, showing snippets of their work in presentations and displays.

Who was involved?

• Fiona Kolontari – Visual Artist
• Jane Round – Visual Artist
• Tony Yardley – 3D Sculpture
• Ruth Jacombs – Dance and Movement
• Peter Dixon – Sound and Music
• Sarah Wilson – ICT and Visual Art
• Ian McCormick – ICT and Film
• Ming de Nasty – Photography and 3D Design

Impact

Twickenham Primary found the whole experience very rewarding, as well as challenging. The whole school came off timetable to immerse themselves in the project, which supported their ongoing enquiries into developing creative teaching and learning opportunities in school.
One of the noticeable impacts was on literacy. One teacher commented “I had great creative writing from them, absolutely astonishing. Even the lowers, they were really inspired to write a report. It was fantastic!”

Many of the children felt they had learned new skills and on reflection some of them started to see how these were actually related to subject areas. They discovered that they had done a lot of literacy, art, ICT, design and technology, dance/PE in particular and felt that through learning new skills they had been improving in these subjects

A Year 5 pupil commented: "Done lots of ICT, we learned how to blog and make videos and we've been doing literacy, we've been interviewing, writing reports and been investigating.”

A Year 3 pupil added: "Someone said in our class that it's better than doing maths, English and science but then Dr Peter said we are doing those subjects!."

Some of the children even went home and continued the project. Comments included: "I got my mum to make some codes for me to solve at home" and “I practised drawing aliens at home” - Year 3 pupil. A Year 2 pupil said: We had to do dancing and we had something to practise at home"

The Head teacher observed a noticeable improvement in speaking and listening particularly with the younger children who were eager to share their observations and discuss each other’s ideas.

Results

Twickenham Primary School is now planning to hold further focus weeks across all year groups. They believe the project was effective in focussing the children and teachers on a particular theme that could be dealt with in so many different ways across the curriculum. Their work with the creative practitioners also ensured the teachers and children took part in a variety of experiences and interventions – giving inspiration for future focus week themes and activities.

As a result of the project, teachers are now building their skills further, enabling them to more confidently and creatively plan focus week delivery.