Wk 11: Essex Hights, Inventions Grade 3
On Monday the 12th of May we went to Essex Hights Primary for our workshoped class on ‘Invention’…it was so fun! I firstly decided to get lost and struggle to find the class. I sat and waited in this large multipurpose drama looking room for fifteen minutes and then decided to go and ask someone for help! When i walked into where they took me i was so shocked. How did they expect us to do a DRAMA workshop in such a tiny space, it was very disappointing as the space was so small and the workshop could have been more exciting in a larger space.
Everrything went amazingly and i was proud of what we had come up with in class in such a small amount of time. We started with getting into small groups and making shapes with bodies to create inventions eg: dishwasher, with sound, they actually did very well and the warm up was a sucess! We then seperated the class into A and B groups and got group A to begin by coming up one at a time and making a machine with their bodys and sound, they did ok, they sort of just stuck around the frriends they were comfortable with and held hands, but they did well. Once group A had finished the ‘deakin students’ were asked to get up and show an example of what a machine with many sounds and attachments would look like and then group B had their turn and did a very good job with the set task.
The next thing we did was the main activity, where we told the students that they were selected as expert science engineers and that it was up to them to design the transport of the future. This was really fun as Jo decided to take thema round the room, on a lift and into a huge coference room (all imaginary) and once they got there they sat up and listened and payed attention to the speakers that were presented to them, all four did a great job although it would have been really nice if they were all more in a character role rather than slip in and out of a character. The children payed attention and they were sent off into groups of 4 or 5 and they started drawing diagrams of their inventions. This task took a little bit of time as there were a few arguments between students as to which part of their invention would go where and do what! I was really shocked as to how well they worked, even some of the pictures that they had drawn were amazingly done…not even i could draw some of the stuff they were doing.
Next we told them that there was going to be a science fair for all of them as they had all been chosen, so they had to chose one design they had made and work out exactly what they wanted to do with that and how it was going to work with diagrams.
Each group then got up and showed the judges their work after a reasonable amount of time. They were fantastic! The children had thought about how their transport was going to work, some saying moon power, solar power…amazing things came out from their pictures and they had one person from each group explain what their transport did.
Being a judge was really fun, it made me feel like i could give constructive and possitive criticism to the children and i felt like they understood me which was for me really nice as i went in thinking that the children would be really young and non responsive. I was definitely wrong about the whole thing and i really would consider maybe even at one stage becoming a primary school teacher.
I thoroughly enjoyed being at the school and would definitely go back to do another session with the children, they were so much more responsive than i thought and the fact that i didn’t expect them to understand the lesson made it even more exciting. I now know that i can not be so judgemental when it comes to children, i should give them the benefit of the doubt and know that i will be able to do any topic within a drama class without a problem. Good stuff all!