About our project: Counting is Cool
There’s a connection between music and maths, and for 24 pre-primary children on Merriwa’s Creative Schools Maths project, becoming confident with counting from one to 20 in sequential order and also being able to recall neighbouring numbers anywhere in that sequence was—literally—as fun as writing and singing a song.
About our school
Merriwa Primary is about 40 mins north from Perth CBD. The school has a range of cultural diversity amongst its students, which we embrace and celebrate through major events such as Harmony Day and NAIDOC Week. The school's motto 'learning for life' captures the community focus of our school. We’re committed to building strong and positive partnerships with parents and the local community.
What happened?
As per the curriculum, the children should be able to know the numbers one to twenty in sequential order and also are required to jump into that sequence at any point and recite or recall what number is before or after. Creating a fun and effective way of learning this was the agenda for teacher Jess Stuart-Hill and musician and visual artist Felicity Groom.
With a background in songwriting, and previous Creative Schools experience of using songs to help children memorise topics, Felicity felt there might be no better way to help children memorise and familiarise themselves with these numbers than to write a song with them.
Term 2’s work focused on making a music video for the song, while our kids could also continue to concentrate on the lyrics and familiarising themselves with the number sequence. We wove many more activities and objectives around these main goals.
How did we use the Five Creative Habits of Learning?
The Creative Habits naturally interacted with these activities, as we set collaborative and creatively challenging tasks. During Jess and Felicity’s reflection process, if we felt there was still a Habit that wasn’t getting as much attention, we designed the following week’s session to incorporate that particular Habit. For instance, Jess wanted to encourage more inquisitiveness so when Felicity brought in musical equipment to record our song, we allowed time for the children to sit with the objects and wonder about them before we went through them together and Felicity demonstrated how they worked.
For the first term we were simply familiarising the students with the words and the concepts of the Five Habits and doing whole class reflections. We then progressed to using the Creative Habits board to ask questions of the students and encourage them to come up with and place a little superhero next to the creative Habit they thought they most used.
What did we discover?
We cracked the code with the reflection activities towards the end of Term 2. We found reflection to be a crucial part of this program and important for unlocking student agency.
Student agency also became more apparent in the second term when the children had the opportunity to do their own filming.
Main curriculum focus: Maths
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