Year 5 Workshop

The lead up to today was very slow as many of us had deadlines for other areas of the course full stop I hadn't really thought of anything as I wasn't sure how I would be able to make a workshop interesting four children and I wanted to make it quite a big thing for example throwing paint everywhere as the children seem to be confided to the classroom so I wanted to see if we could get them outside but I wasn't sure how I would be able to do something like that or even be able to bring something like Messi into a classroom and keep it quite controlled. Gina had mentioned that the year 5 tutor wanted us to do something around insects. No one seemed to have many ideas other than Gina who had said about caterpillars and butterflies which everyone seem to like the idea of however I thought it was very two dimensional which the children seem to do a lot of so I'd mention the fact that what about bringing a 3D aspect into this for example loo rolls bottles which were welcomed to the idea as well.

When it came to us delivering the exercise for the children they all seemed very excited we did A Very Short Introduction got the children to answer questions about what they already knew about the process between caterpillars to butterflies which they knew quite a bit of. As the exercise went on myself and the three other girls were just going round explaining what the children could do. Gina had bought a butterfly foam thing that the children were using as an outline or as the butterfly instead of using the round imagination which is what was intended for them to do but this gave them a easy way out and didn't make them use their imagination and creativity as much as we had hoped so moving forward if we ask them to do something which is object based we do not take in anything that resembles that object so that the children can be as creative as they can. With the Caterpillar as there was no stencil photo or anything the children did struggle and ask some questions as to how they could do this caterpillar with a little nudge for one of the members Jodie she basically just asked what do you think a caterpillar looks like and this child has created something very colourful and he was very pleased with what he had made.

I feel this exercise went very well despite the fact that the children were using the butterfly phone things as the butterflies but many children did decide to create the amount of bottles or the loo roll cardboard tubes which I'm happy about. As I mentioned I wouldn't bring anything in that that resembles the final product as I feel that that limits the child's creativity regardless of what it is even if you just need that tiny bit of encouragement it's still their decision you just there to facilitate their learning so if they wanted to create a butterfly with two wings that would just send me circles either side then they learnt something from that and they can compare with what everyone else is done see where they've gone wrong. I feel even though I would say I'm a strong team member that this exercise I did step quite back from I should have got more involved with it which I am disappointed in myself about however I know that next time this was to happen I need to come up with ideas or whether they're humongous and I can't see that they're going to be done easily because someone else in the group might have similar ideas or would be able to down scale it to fit the room.

Here are the photos from today