Changing for Ourselves
St Joseph's Infant School in Luton asked: How can we engage all types of learners in the school through developing child-initiated learning?
After meeting several Creative Practitioners, Year 2 children chose to work with puppeteer Michele Petit-Jean who had excited and engaged them with instant shadow-puppets. The project explored story-telling and different kinds of puppetry using recycled materials, which fit perfectly with the spring term ‘Eco-School’ theme.
Project objectives
The school was very keen to embed a skills based creative curriculum and enhance cross-curricular learning. They felt the key to achieving this was for the children to have more ownership over their learning and more ability to lead its direction.
They felt the need to be re-inspired by external partners with more direct experience of creative practices:
“Our children are changing and we need to develop a curriculum that will engage them and develop in them a love of learning. We want our children to become lifelong learners.”
Impact
- There was an improvement in children’s enjoyment of learning, but the biggest impact was on their speaking and listening skills.
- The children were more confident in expressing themselves; the assembly for parents and the presentation that the children did for the junior school was amazing!
- All staff working with the children discovered that they were more able and more capable of doing things; they were also very good at teaching each other skills.
- The class teacher learnt that you have to give children freedom to find out things for themselves as they are then more engaged and learning is deeper.
Results
The school’s understanding of what a ‘Creative Curriculum’ means has changed; it is not just being cross curricular - it is about taking risks and teachers being less controlling. The creative curriculum will be put onto the school development plan again so that it can be embedded.
