Blog: Creativity, Writing and the Great Outdoors
We’ve been working with Kirkhill Primary School in partnership with Aberdeen City Council to deliver a project called Creativity, Writing and the Great Outdoors. The aims for this project were to improve children’s writing attainment through creative approaches based on outdoor themes. It was also about empowering teachers to use creative approaches to learning more frequently and giving them a toolkit of ideas to draw from in the future.
Our inspiration from the Great Outdoors was the fairytale Hansel and Gretel. We used this story to create a work plan that allowed us to focus on the writing aims of the individual classes while using a creative method of delivery. Being a dance company our first thoughts were for dance and how we can take inspiration from this fairytale and create movement around it. This was layered with the added challenge of having a Curriculum for Excellence goal at the end of our project.
P2/3 students showing off their monster puppets.
For our younger P2/3 class, we wanted to improve their sentence structure, work on finger dexterity, pressure when writing on paper and increasing their vocabulary so they can extend their sentences with the use of adjectives. By the end of the project, we were able to create our own fairy tale about monsters. They made finger puppets of their own personal monster, choreographed a dance to illustrate the story which they filmed and recorded a voice over for too. Definitely not the conventional way to achieve writing attainments but definitely a fun and unique approach!
For our older class, the P6/7’s, we were tasked with teaching about poetry, syllables, limericks and song lyrics.
It was important to us to teach the basics of balances, lifts, and counter weights as we believe they inform part of the basics of dance. Being able to know where your weight is, how to lift another person safety but also understand the mechanics of it all is hugely beneficial especially as your body is growing and changing. It also allows the students to build trust in one another and to feel connected and safe outside of their friendship group. The classes became more and more ambitious as their confidence grew and they began creating exciting and different lifts, balances and counter weights with each other.
Exploring the local parks and outdoor areas, gave the students a fresh, new environment to describe and draw inspiration from. Everything from textures, to sounds, to smells all informed our writing and dancing by bringing different and interesting ideas. It also created a mess in the classroom when we discovered all the sticks, rocks and plants that had been brought back!
P2/3 class at The Gramps, a local park in Aberdeen.
The gingerbread house in Hansel and Gretel with its ice cream roof was a huge source of inspiration and creativity. From making our own ice cream flavours, to writing unusual ice cream poems, to opening an ice cream shop in the classroom and crafting ice creams to share! Here are some of the bizarre ice cream flavours the students invented and wrote into poems:
“Tuna and cheese topped with whipped cream
Mushroom stroganoff and chicken supreme”
“Orange, apple, Irn bru,
Chocolate and burgers, bubblegum too”
We were able to connect our learning to Shaper/Caper’s hugely successful children’s show The Adventures of Isabel, in which there is a section based around the poem Bleezers Ice Cream by Jack Prelutsky. There is a whole section of professional choreography that I could teach the children along with an ice cream poem to give them ideas when creating their own movement.
P2/3 students showing off their homemade ice creams.
A P6/7 student finger panting.
Another task we explored was performing a finger/hand dance that uses different surfaces of the hand, pressure and speed, which all relate to holding a pencil and learning to write. We took the finger dance a step further and created paintings of our movement. This visually showed the patterns of our dance on a page and areas where there was light touch and areas of lots of pressure. For the older students it was also about expression and artistic development of a dance into an art piece.
The joy and excitement oozing from each student during the creative sessions has been so rewarding to experience. Words and even pictures capturing the journey for both classes don’t begin to give their creativity and learning enough justice.
