You need to build something to be creative. Fabius

The Importance of Projects (and Grandparents Day)

This quote from Fabius is at the heart of why projects are an important and integral part of a collective inquiry at Princes Hill Primary School. For children to deeply learn, we believe they must find authentic contexts in which to explore their curiosity, engage with each other’s understandings, and collaboratively build learning from rich shared experiences and provocations. In short, build, make or create something! Our projects allow for reflection and synthesis of the year’s collaborative learning journeys. 

“We do not learn from experience….we learn from reflecting on experience.” –  John Dewey

“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” – Albert Einstein

Our journey together exploring the ideas and concepts connected to creativity began with an authentic discovery of writing on a plaque in the playground. This led to provocations across the spaces to explore the place of text and writing in the children’s world. We began to recognise and wonder about the children’s creativity as they made stories in the learning commons, built imaginary and real worlds in the construction space, and explored the natural world through art and science in the studio. What did children understand about creativity and its processes or inspirations? As these and other questions were provoked and explored, three distinct projects began to emerge alongside an ongoing inquiry into the human brain.

Because creativity means you make something beautiful and art is beautiful and you use art with your brain.  Max

The 100 Birds Mobile project came from the children’s interest and sharing of birds nests coupled with the ongoing explorations with text, specifically thought and speech bubbles. 

Writing is learning how to write words and letters… I think if we didn’t know how to write then we wouldn’t know how to write books.    Nina

The Community Library Box grew from the strong desire to share and create stories. The children were constantly drawn to making their own small books or booklets. 

(My construction)…is complex because it didn’t have any instructions and I built it from my imagination!     Matilda

The Racing Derby became an active and essential way for the children to express and deepen their understanding of creative processes, engineering and the science of simple machines and forces. 

All three projects have afforded children opportunities to reflect on their year; where they began as learners, the processes and experiences involved in learning, including family support during remote learning, and finally an end product that reflects many of the ideas and experiences of our year together., and just as importantly, the projects offered the children a chance to share and explain the learning to a wider audience on Grandparents Day. Grandparents Day gave all three projects a deeper sense of authenticity and purpose, providing real opportunities for reflection and synthesis through the creation of posters. The children will proudly leave a trace of their learning in the form of the bird mobile and the community library box as well as posters documenting all three projects. These traces of learning will hopefully inspire and provoke thinking about creativity within future prep children, teachers and families. 

My favourite part of Grandparents Day was showing my grandma everything I have worked on like my storybook! Gemma

My favourite thing about Grandparents day was when I showed my grandpa how much effort I put into making the race track at the racing derby. Oscar

I loved making music with Deb…I think they must have liked it too! Nina

We tell them what we did this year so we tell them what we done, so they could write it down and see what we are doing… Finnley

…..because they are special people we want to see our learning…. Chiara

We share what we learned so everyone shared our learning so everyone knows we are learning! Emily

We began this post with a quote from one of our children. It is listening to and being guided by the thinking of Prep children that has allowed us to develop and follow such a strong pathway for our year’s inquiries and discoveries into creativity. We would like to finish this blog with a quote from another child that we believe serves as a beautiful analogy of our year together. 

You can make something and help your friends to find out something they don’t know.  Badral

Thank you all.