How can we look after the world

The workshop in school went better than i thought it would. The children were very engaged and motivated and showed interest throughout. They were fascinated with the Crumble and enjoyed working together as a team during the D.T aspect.

We split the teaching across the two subjects to make the delivery of the lessons smooth and organised.  As Katie and I visited the school the first time we therefore followed on from our previous input from our first visit into school. We got the children to feedback their findings from their homework and asked them what colors they thought they would use to represent these issues. We asked the children if they remembered the design brief from last time and informed them of the change and that the project was now year group project and each group would be assigned a continent. We recapped over the continents and from what the children found out in their homework we then decided what continents the lights would go in and this led in nicely with the next part of the day which was the ICT lesson.

Throughout the ICT teaching i showed the programming on the big screen for the  children to use whilst Jaime talked through how to connect the wires step by step, this demonstrated sharing roles with the children. I also went round helping struggling groups however overall the children picked this up quite easily. However they surprisingly struggled with plaiting the wires, which was what i considered to be the more basic aspect. It was good to see the children making connections with Scratch showing their ability to use prior knowledge. The ICT coordinator showed real interest in the project and even spoke about investing in some crumble kits for the school.

During the D.T part of the day the children worked well together as a group assigning roles, such as cutting, sticking, designing and sewing. I believe our input of assigning team roles helped this to run smoothly

Towards the end of the project we asked the children to evaluate their work. After a miscommunication the first time where the children evaluated us rather than their own work. We therefore ensured to communicate clearly with the second class and asked the pupils to evaluate their own work. The children said what they enjoyed, what they feel went well and what they personally needed to improve. This helped us to reflect on our own teaching as well as how  the children thought it went.

This project has been extremely valuable to my professional development as a teacher, i have learnt:

• How to effectively implement cross curricular links.
• How to teach creatively in ICT.
• How to use the Crumble software.
• How to face challenges as a group.
• Manage time effectively.
• How to teach in a team.

Once we had got our recyclable materials and prepared the transfers, we wanted to ensure we were confident enough to teach crumble to the children, I went back over the software familiarizing myself with teaching strategies to make it easy for the children to learn. We decided the children would sit in groups of three and we thought about different roles that each of them could do.

Such as:

• Putting the circuit together.
• Programming the software on the computer.
• Choosing the different colors to represent the issues and changing these on the programme.
  However we wanted to ensure the each of the pupils had a chance to do different roles. We therefore found a step by step hand out guide to give to each of the groups (see below) to facilitate the learning.

When we were back in the workshop we also gathered the materials that we got from the scrap store and some from the D.T workshop and cut these up into manageable pieces for the children to use we then tested different glues, such as: Glue sticks, fabric glue and PVA.

We concluded PVA worked the best and this would be most efficient and available in the school.

We then put together a power point to refresh the children on the design brief, set a structure of the day and plan how we were going to share roles in teaching. Here we also discussed health and safety and how to share roles within a team, we wanted to ensure the project was inclusive for all and flowed as smoothly as possible. Below is the power point put together by our group prior to our workshop in the school.

How we can look after the world-2mdtcvy

 

 

After collaborating and coming up with the idea of doing the map for each group. We discussed further about the resources we would need and how we were going to deliver this to the children. We realized due to only having half a day in each class, with these time constraints it would be difficult to ask each group to make a whole world map and programme crumble. After discussing with our lecturers we came up with the idea to make a whole year group project giving a continent to each group. I felt much more confident and positive about  this idea as I believed it to be more achievable  and would be lovely to bring back a final piece that the year group achieved together.

Katie and I started looking for outlines of continents that could be printed using transfer paper. We then cut out pieces of fabric for each of the continents to be printed on.  Whilst Katie transferred these on to the fabric, Jaime and I went to the ‘Squirrel Scrap Store’ to gather recyclable materials that the children could use to collage on to the continents, I feel this was a good representation to fit in with theme of our project ‘ How can we look after our world?’ and gave the opportunity for children to use a wide range of resources to display their D.T skills.

 

When we first received the design brief we collaborated possible ideas how we could integrate DT and ICT. From looking at the school curriculum map on their website The first point of our design brief is that we wanted to create something with accordance to the ideas of UNICEF. We discussed and built on each others ideas, and eventually came up with the project title “How can we look after our world?” We felt we could incorporate both good use of ICT and DT into this project and many other cross curricular links, such as science, geography and PSHE. The main point we wanted to follow to meet the title of the project was to use recyclable materials, as this would make use of a range of materials with an additional purpose of helping the world.

THE DESIGN BRIEF:

To create a map collage of the world using recyclable materials. On this collage will be 3 countries illuminated by LED light programmed on Crumble. These lights with either represent the top three countries that use the most

• Water

• Waste

• Litter

• Pollution

• Energy

[embeddoc url=”https://eportfolios.roehampton.ac.uk/clearyh/files/2017/05/D.t-WORLD-1jqjqm7.pptx” download=”all” viewer=”microsoft” ]

We gave the children some research based homework to utilize the time. The children will bring back their  findings and come to an agreed decision on 3 of the countries they will chose to light up.

We briefed the children on the project using the powerpoint above, they responded well to this and came up with lots of good ideas which enabled them to think collaboratively and come up with some questions about the project, which we assisted with.