About our projects: Shape Quest and For the Record
Design a maths-related game of 2D and 3D characters. Look back over the last 100 years and figure out how things have changed for people and places. These were the Maths and History-focused projects that a mixture of St Joseph’s students undertook for Creative Schools in 2023.
About our school:
St Joseph’s is a small Catholic school in Pemberton. For Creative Schools, 12 students in Yr 1/2 participated in term 2 and 15 students Years 1-3 participated in Term 3.
What happened:
Teacher Millie Charlton and writer and theatre practitioner Kim Crotty focused on different curriculum areas in both terms.
In Term 2, the Shape Quest project sprang from the idea to incorporate the Year 1/2 maths curriculum into a game. Kids designed maths-based directional board games and fashioned their own playing characters first drawing them in 2D then converting the drawings into 3D with plasticine. The kids would then navigate these characters through the game, facing challenges along the way. To defeat the ‘maths-monsters’ and get to the finish, the kids had to solve curriculum-relevant math problems. Everyone played their own board game before inviting other teams to try their game.
In Term 3, our curriculum focus was history and how things have changed over the last 100 years, for people and their lives. We had the kids program a time machine to travel into the future to see what the world would be like in 100 years’ time, but alas, the machine malfunctioned so the past, present, and future got mixed up. So, we had to reprogram it, beginning with the ‘Evolution of Things’ over the last 100 years, sequencing items from the categories of transport, toys, music, computers and communication. Rather than focus on significant events of history, we focused on changes that are relevant to the children’s daily lives and standard of living.
Then we looked at personal history. The kids created a comic strip superhero origin story, ‘The Hero is Me.’ Their superpower had to be one of the Five Creative Habits of Learning. They had to imagine how the school lunchboxes of their grandparents’ time differed from now. Finally, with the last 100 years back in order, we made some predictions about the future and wrote a letter to our future selves. Then we reprogrammed the time machine.
How did we use the Five Creative Habits of Learning?
We related everything we did in the class to the Habits and framed all the kids’ work and activities as expressions of creativity. Our weekly reflections were based on Voyagers’ Golden Records. Each week, the kids painted the corresponding colour of their most used creative habits onto a record.
Main Curriculum Focus
Term 2 Maths: 2d and 3d shapes, directions
Term 3 Humanities and Social Sciences: history
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