Meeting at Brooks on the 28th of February

The past Wednesday the 28th of February we met at Brooks building to discuss our ideas for the upcoming workshop on the 8th of March. The aim is to create a lesson plan for the session.

At the beginning of the meeting, Elle reminded us that the session should be about us teaching or command the children to do something. Instead, it should be something freer that would allow participants to discover and learn through creative and alternative methods. To illustrate this, she talked about the visit to the MMU library's special collection, which I was unable to attend. During this visit, their guide, Louise, presented them several objects and invited them to share their opinions and question the objects. She then provided them information about the objects. We did something similar during this meeting, focusing on an unknown object found in the clay room and a pair of scissors.

Athina and I were invited to interrogate the object and observe it carefully to guess what was its use and the most important aspects of it. By questioning and sharing our hypothesis, our curiosity about the actual use of the object was raised. Elle mentioned this was related to "active learning", a method which focuses on how students learn and not merely on what is learnt. Active learning encourages students to think hard instead of receiving information passively.

Then, when focusing on the pair of scissors, we were asked how did we know how to use them and how did we know what they were. This brought back memories from us. Personally, I remembered my experience teaching a little girl how to use a pair of scissors in my job as a nursery nurse. The girl struggled to understand how to use the scissors, and I showed her how to do it by holding the scissors myself and then by helping her to position her fingers correctly. This experience made think that something as simple as using scissors is not a knowledge we acquire spontaneously, but rather a process we learn.

Elle mentioned "object-based learning", a type of active learning which centres on the student and uses objects to facilitate deep learning.

Another important aspect discussed during this meeting was the definition and difference between the aim and objective of the lesson, something which wasn't clear to me. The aim is the learning outcome of the lesson, which we proposed could be to engage with abstract ways of using language. Whereas the objective is how will the aim be achieved. This could be engagement through discussion, interrogation of clay as a material and share ideas, observations, feelings, etc. The objectives, however, are something we still need to define as a group.

After this, Silva, Athina and I proposed ideas for the workshop. One of the ideas was to divide the session into 3 parts. First a "warmer" or icebreaker of ten minutes, then the main activity, which could be either one or two and finally, a plenary.

The ideas were the following:

1) Warmer:

* Broken telephone (also known as chinesse telephone) an activity to start developing language from the start of the session.

* Bag of surprise objects. This activity was explained in one of my older posts and the idea is to put a series of objects inside a bag. The children, while blindfolded, take an object out of the bag and need to guess what it is. The activity can be done in pairs to make sure it lasts ten minutes.

* Matching objects with given words. This warmer is based on the list of vocabulary given to us, with adjectives such as hard, wet, etc. It is also based on the library visit. The idea is that on a table we would place several tools and objects that are used to make clay. We would also print a list of adjectives, so the participants can match the words with the objects, and, describe them using their own words.

* Present pictures of food and ask questions. Several pictures of food around the world or breakfasts would be printed so the participants could comment about them.

* Questioning objects. Again, this is based on the library's visit and is similar to what I previously described on this posts. We would give participants objects they don't know and others they are familiar with, and would ask questions so they can try and guess what the unknown objects are or, how do they know the functionality of the familiar objects.

2) Activties

*Make food out of clay

*Make a storyline. Each children makes a figure in clay and then, they create a story incorporating all the pieces.

*Textures in clay and imaginary animals.

3) Plenary

*Discuss their creations with the class.

*Guess what your partner made or share your opinion about your parner's piece.

I wanted to do something similar to what Charlie did in the PLANT NOMA workshop, (as mentioned in my lesson plans) and that was to dedicate part of the session to teaching the basic clay methods such as slab, cross-hatching, etc. However, as pointed by my classmates, this took a long time. A better option would be to suggest the best ways to work with clay and mention those methods as the children work and develop their own pieces.

Before the workshop, I would like to research active learning and object based learning in depth.