Revisit the future: unifying the word through our voice
Year 4 pupils at Enquiry School, Winsor Primary, used creative writing, poetry and performance skills to explore the theme of the past, present and future of the Olympics. Pupils considered the qualities it takes to become an Olympian and related them to their own lives and practices.
The project began with a small group of pupils, acting as representatives for the two participating classes who planned the workshop sessions alongside Adisa Stephen-Ezeocha and two teachers. In January, Adisa performed for the whole school to generate interest across the school community.
Weekly sessions were then held with Year 4 classes which included reflection time for students to help inform the content of the next session.
The final performance was held at a local church hall and attended by 60 parents. Pupils were inspired to create their best work to raise the profile of the project within the school wider community.
After the performance, Adisa led a CPD session alongside the Year 4 teachers for the whole school staff. The aims of this session was to share the successes of the project and to provide staff with practical activities that enabled them to confidently use the approaches developed during this project in following years.
Project objectives
- To raise pupil’s engagement, creativity and confidence in literacy thereby raising standards;
- To better understand how creative approaches to teaching literacy and encouraging pupils to be co-constructors of learning can be put into practice in the classroom;
- To use the theme of the Olympics to encourage pupils to think about change, both personal and environmental;
- To use the theme of the Olympics to draw parallels between the pupils and athletes, by framing the act of writing as an exercise and the idea of being at school as training for the future.
Results
- Pupils were enthusiastic about writing poetry, the children who were generally less able in their writing, or those that were usually quite shy, became more outspoken and created writing to a good standard;
- teachers picked up creative ideas on teaching poetry and have since generated ideas on how the project can be rolled out to the different key stages;
- the school is now committed to organising poetry days or weeks where the pupils can work on a specific poem, and then share in assembly.
