About our projects: UR Walpole and Walpole = Centre of the Universe
UR Walpole is a program that has been running at the Walpole school for about 25 years whereby the school has a local focus for one term of the year. During that time, our students engage with numerous local people to research and learn about a different theme every year. This year the theme was fire in the landscape. The Centre of the Universe project looked at where Walpole is in relation to the rest of the world.
About our school:
Walpole Primary is a very small regional school on the south coast of Western Australia. With the small student numbers, classes are made up of multiple year groups. The class involved with Creative Schools program was a year 4,5 and 6 group with a total of 14 children in the class. This small group of mixed ages has its difficulties but also some advantages over the standard class of 25-30 same-aged students.
What happened:
Given that Walpole is a small town surrounded by national parks, fire is a local concern of great importance and relevance. During Term 2 teacher Sarah Walker and visual artist and musician Peter Hill tackled the theme of fire from multiple angles and managed to cross over between different areas of the curriculum.
With this group being so small it gave us plenty of leeway to let the children give their thoughts on where we could go with the project. The children often helped to steer the direction of the projects their expression in the warmups and the early standalone projects.
By spending the first couple of sessions on seemingly unrelated exploratory projects we got a sense of what interests the children shared and were then able to apply this information into our fire-related projects across the term.
During Term 3 we focused on where Walpole is in relation to Australia and within a world context to learn about the continents of the world. We had originally considered linking in with the science curriculum for this age group, the planets, but ended up staying within the confines of the continents.
The students surveyed all the children at the school for their family links to countries across the world and searched the ex-student networks to try and find where students who had been in year 4/5/6 in past years now live. All of this information was collated and plotted out onto a world map that we scaled up onto the school oval.
How did we use the Five Creative Habits of Learning?
We linked them to the warm-ups, and had children collaborate in different-sized groups.
What did we discover?
That the curriculum comes alive through play. We chose to create projects with a very direct link to the Walpole area. Our hope was to make the projects as relevant to the children's lives as possible and ensure that they had a holistic approach to learning.
We used elements of fun, especially in the warm-ups, to get the children engaged. The use of workshop style lessons makes it much easier to be teaching a few of the core subjects simultaneously. As an outdoors person Peter tried to get the class outside as much as the weather would allow and tried to link the fun warm-up exercises with the previous session’s curriculum content.
By having multiple approaches to the chosen themes and subjects we managed to keep surprising the children with a new dynamic to learning.
The impact on the school
With Walpole being a small school there is a small number of teachers and students can have the same teacher for a couple of years. So to be able to complement the fulltime teacher and be an extra voice has had a big impact. This is especially so for the boys as all the teachers, other than the Principal, are women and I have been able to be a role model as a man who is interested in learning and creativity.
As my own children attend a very similar school in Northcliffe, I am aware that academically focused children can be considered as at risk. The Creative Schools program gives an opportunity to challenge those children. With essentially two teachers working at one time, you can cater to a greater spread of skill level.
The feedback given to me directly by the students and in their written reflections backs up my thoughts on the impact. My conversations with parents after assembly also confirmed that the children enjoyed and were engaged with the program.
- Creative Practitioner
Main Curriculum Focus:
Term 2 Science:
• Fire in the landscape
Cross-curricular Links:
• History
• Geography
Term 3 Humanities & Social Sciences:
Geography
• The continents
Cross-curricular Links:
• History
• Humanities & Social Sciences
• Maths
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