#projectforkids Archives - Funky Socks & Dragons

One of my student’s design. Created using deepai.org

I decided to share this idea here because I love how this whole idea happened, from just one little Maths exercise into a fully-blown, multi-media, multi-subject project. It is not a story of careless teacher who did not plan the lesson properly, rather a story of a lesson that, suddenly, blossomed and a teacher who saw the full potential.

Step 1 or I only wanted to make Maths a bit more exciting

The year 2 in Maths has been, so far, quite an adventure. Especially after we survived addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions and decimals… After those first six heavy duty months of the academic year, the lighthearted Maths came up. I mean, it is still fun, measurements, statistics and geometry, all of that is amazing and we learn a lot but after everything we did before, it is just easy-peasy.

This project happened when we were in the unit of Area and Perimeter and while working on a task from the coursebook ( ) which was pretty easy and straightfoward: ‘to design a garden of the area of 80 m2 and calculate its perimeter’, I realised that my students were really enjoying the task. Truly, madly, deeply. They started to add flowers, trees, huts, colours and some random animals. Maybe it was because while explaining area and perimeter, I drew my own farm and a pig and a chicken…All in all, they got a lot more into it than I expected. There was definitely a lot more potentatial.

That is precisely why for the following lesson I decided to give them a summer hut to design and to draw and to calculate. The main aim here was to follow very specific directions and information and to put together a house in which all the rooms have specific size but they can be of any shape the little architects wanted. It was amazing to see how, again, they got into it but how, at the same time, they already wanted to do more and get more freedom and to add their rooms. Obviously I had to promise that we would design our proper houses when we will have the freedom to do almost whatever we want.

Our project has properly took off in the third lesson. The task my students got was to design a house they wanted: decide which rooms they want to have apart from the main set (the kitchen, the living room, the bedroom, the bathroom and the veranda), make a decision about the area of each of them, to calculate the total area of the house and not have it exceed the allowed area of 200 m2 and use the remaining part of the lot on the garden, the swimming pool or the garage. The main focus here was the Maths and calculations. The follow up task would have to be calculating the perimeter, too.

In order to make the task easier I looked up 200m2 houses with real designs, to understand how big this house can be, how many bedrooms and rooms can be fit in and how it could be organised. The first thing that came up was a lovely website from New Zealand and that is exactly what we used. I printed one of the plans and colour-coded it for the kids to better understand it and we had a look at it during the preparation for the house.

The description and the photo, already in the notebook.

Step 2 Visualisation or ‘Let’s draw it!’

The design could not be done without the floor plan because that is where the real fun starts. I realised it when I was preparing my house plan. Guess what: design is not easy! Putting together all the rooms in some kind of a reasonable shape, the walls adjacent and location of all the rooms…Because I designed my own house, I could prepare the kids better for the task. The following things had to be taken into consideration:

the area of each room and the total maximum area of the house, the calcuations we had to make on the way
the colour-coding of the rooms to make the design clear and easy to understand
the scrap paper to calculate and to draw on not to destroy the actual design
the pencils, the rules and the erasers for all the kids and to tell the students that it might be necessary to fix their desing as you go along because your ideas can change
to allow and encourage the kids to check and to compare their projects and to exchange ideas to inspire each other
to model and to share ideas about the non-standard rooms like the cinema room, the library, the secret room…

This would have already been great because they really got involved in the task and the houses already became precious. And, of course, we met our Maths aims: calculating and measuring. Somehow, during the lesson, we had a student who had already finished and, automatically almost, it turned into a conversation about the house and the student really enjoyed talking about it. I decided on the spot that there must be more lessons and a proper presentation.

Step 3 or ‘Tell me about it…’

Truth be told, I am kind of lucky because I have four lessons of Maths a week and four lessons of English so that gives me quite a lot of flexibility and freedom. I have the time that I can devote to the projects. On Thursday, our final day of the week, we usually have English and Maths and I decided to use both lessons on finishing the project.

In the first lesson, we were finishing our designs and preparing for the presentation. I told the children that we are going to rehearse in the classroom and then, in a separate classroom, my amazing T.A. will make making short videos of the presentations.

I prepared a template for the kids to use and it was both on the board and on the handout that they took into the recording room (‘Hello! My name is…and I am an architect. This is my house. The area of my house is…The perimeter of my house is… In my house I’ve got…My biggest room is…and my favourite room is… The task was easy / difficult and it was interesting / boring because…Thank you).

My more independent students rehearsed together and I helped out some of my less independent students. Then, my T.A. was taking the students into a quiet room and recording the little videos.

While I was preparing this stage of the lesson, I realised that I needed some grand finale and a reward for all this hard work.

Step 4 or ‘We need a real illustration’

As you can see from the photos, the drawing of the outside of the house was a part of this project as, initially, I wanted the kids to simply create it themselves. However, they got so involved in the design and creating of the floor plan that asking them to draw another picture would be too repetitive. What is more, it is not so easy to draw the house in the time we had left for this lesson and ‘just drawing’ does not lead to any language production. And using the A.I. certainly does!

Now, I know that there are many disadvantages of using A.I. and there has been a lot of talk in the recent weeks of how it abuses the copyright and how environment-unfriendly it is but it is a perfect solution for the young writers and so I decided to use it again in my lessons*).

I explained for the kids that an A.I. engine would create the images of the outside of the house if we prepare detailed descriptions for it. Everyone got a small handout and they had to make more decisions about their design: the location of the house (country, city, etc), the colour of the house, the surroundings, the garden, the fence etc. I took their notes home and typed them up and then brought the pictures to class. We had a lot of fun looking at all the photos and trying to guess which house was whose. Indeed, this worked very, very well.

Instead of a coda

We had a great time with the project and I am very happy with how it turned out

My students drew, calculated, read, wrote and spoke a lot.
We managed to include almost all language skills and at least three different subjects.
The kids had a chance to express themselves creatively and to make independent decisions but also to be the real scientists, to follow instructions and the rules, to be accurate.
It was important to add the last bit, the outside of the house because this was where my students really let themselves be creative. As can be seen in the photographs, the gardens filled with flowers, trees, dugongs, peacocks and dogs and the kids were really specific about the location of their houses, too.
I could not watch the videos being made, I only watched the final product and it was a real pleasure to see the kids speak freely and independently, adding some details and getting into a real conversation. I was really proud of them and, in a way, this project was their end-of-year project and I can say they all learned a lot.
We shared the videos with the parents so I hope it will also help everyone remember this year and the progress we made.
For me, as a teacher, this project will be a memory of how a real, fully-fledged project developed in the making and that the most important thing is to keep my teaching eyes open for new options and for all of the potential that it may hold. Knowing everything from the beginning is not always an advantage. There might always be more that is possible.
The basis for the project were very simple handouts that you can see in the photographs. We kept them all in our portfolios (aka the notebooks). The videos were shared with the parents digitally.
All of the activities described here took a total of 5 lessons. I am not sure if this is everything that a teacher can set aside for a project but I decided to keep everything in and, as always, we adapt to everything that is possible in a specific context and with a specific timetable and a number of hours a week available.

Happy teaching!

*) Do I feel guilty? No, not really. My A.I. footprint is minimal – all my words come right from my brain, I only use the visual creations and very, very rarely. The total of times I have used A.I. for my projects is still under ten. I think I am fine, for now.

Ingredients

A set of shapes of your choice, cut out of paper before the lesson
An A4 piece of paper with the list of figures that will be included in the activity.
A glue stick for every child, a pencil to take notes

Procedures

Naturally, this project involved some pre-lesson preparation: the handout, the glue and, most of all, all the shapes which needed to be cut up and sorted out. I used 5 separate boxes to make sure that they don’t mixed and are easy to select and to abandon.
We had two lessons devoted to shapes and so we could do all of the following as a preparation for the project: introducing the shapes, looking for the shapes in the classroom, song Can you see a circle? from Super Simple Songs, looking at Shapes Monsters from Twinkl, to recognise and to count them, making shapes from pipe cleaners (the example of which you can see above), working on the sequence (‘circle, square, circle, square’) and, as a direct example for our creativity, looking at some transport made of shapes (also found on Twinkl).
The next step was a set of instructions. At the moment I work with a teacher assistant and I saw it as an opportunity to use this resource in setting up the project. I prepared my instructions to use the simplest language possible but I still asked my TA to translate sentence by sentence. The main elements were these: We are doing a project. We have five shapes (displayed on the board). You can make something for yourself. Maybe a flower, maybe a car, maybe a monster (referring to everything that we saw in class). All ideas are good ideas. You can use 10 shapes (gesture). Please sit down and think. I will call one student to come here and choose shapes. Sasha, come here, choose 10 shapes. etc.
Afterwards, with Sasha choosing her shapes, two students helped with giving out the handouts and the glue.
Everyone kept working on their shapes, I was walking among them, helping and monitoring and as soon as they were finishing, I would come up and ask them to count all the shapes they have used.
In the end, the kids were showing their projects to each other but it was not a formal stage of the lesson. Ideally, we should have finished with everyone showing their work and presenting ti with a simple ‘I’ve got…’ but, unfortunately, in our case, we ran out of time.

Why we like it

In general, it is a simple project with a lot of potential and it can be used in a variety of lessons.
In a Maths lesson, like ours, it is a an opportunity to see the practical use of shapes and to balance the serious studying with a more creative task. It also involves shapes recognition and counting. It was also an interesting follow-up and development on the previous lessons in yet another way: we looked at shapes, we counted shapes in shapes pictures, we looked for shapes in the classroom and we made shapes out of pipe cleaners. These last two activities were especially exciting for the kids and that was my cue for a more hands-on activities.
In an English lesson on shapes, this activity could also work very well, especially that there is the early literacy activity which, potentially, can be extended. The kids can be asked to copy the words from the board and, in this case, the ‘handout’ will not be necessary. The kids can also be asked to write the name of the picture they created, especially if they work within a vocabulary framework, for example toys, pets, animals or transport, although, admittedly, this would put a kind of a harness on the creative thinking here.
In an Art lesson, this activity can be connected with any artist who liked shapes for example Kandinsky, Malevich, Mondrian, El Lissitzky or even Picasso. Apart from the main art project, there would also be an input session devoted to the Artist of the Day. If you are looking for ideas, please have a look here, at Teaching English Through Art.
As a first project, this lesson was a wonder (and please forgive me blowing my own trumpet here!). The kids got the idea and they really took to it. Everyone interpreted the task in their own way and created some lovely pictures, some of which are an inspiration for me as a teacher, for example to draw the shape first and use the shapes to create a proper collage or to make a list of all the shapes necessary beforehand, in order to facilitate and to promite the Thinking Time stage of the project. Please make sure you have a look at the examples below.
The kids got involved in the project, even though there were a few who were slightly reluctant in the beginning. However, as soon as it became obvious that, really, all ideas are good ideas, they started to work on their projects.
The next time I do this project, I will make sure I prepare my own model. I was planning to do it but then the teaching day started and I simply forgot. It would have helped with the instructions and the whole project, including the counting of the numbers and the final presentation.
As regards the choice of the resources, it seems that it was also a good idea to go for a more exciting type of craft paper, as regards the gloss, the texture, the print or a mixture of these. It really adds up to the success of the project. It might be also a good idea to consider an A3 paper for the base, the A4 might be a bit limiting, although A3 is definitely a more tricky size to carry around, to take home or, even, to put up on the wall.
It really was a way for all the kids to exercise their creativity and I am very proud of my students. Some of the creations are simply brilliant and they helped me learn something new about my students. It is also a signal for me to use more of these activities.

Some noteworthy examples of creativity from my kids

This is Lena who was the student to plan her project properly, out of her own accord. She prepared a list of ingredients necessary and, as you can see it does not quite match the number of the shapes used. We fixed it later, after the photo was taken, by writing: circles: 3 + 3 etc.

This is Sergey who decided to take a completely different route and to create a proper work of art, made of hearts only and with a red pencil which is also glued to the paper.

This is Sasha, who was initially very uninspired by the task as he prefers listening. However, after a while, he figured out how to combine the two. He drew an ice-cream cone and then, once it was ready, he came to choose his shapes. This is a lovely approach and I will definitely be using it in the future!

This is a beautiful example of how creative kids can get. Sasha, whose most favourite thing in the world are horses, found a way of creating a horse with the shapes we had. It shows a high level of development of symbolic representation as well as creativity. We see a horse in it hence it is a horse.

This is a picture by Nicol, quite simple one, just a house, we might say, but it is just wonderful because of the paper used and because of the consistent use of hears as windows.

And another wonderful picture, a bear, in which Sasha, decided to use a variety of techniques, including drawing and elements of origami to create a 3D eyes and muzzle for the bear.

This example comes from Sasha, who decided to go for a seemingly simple design of a structure, made of only four shapes. However, it was nothing but simple! The big blue square is in fact glued expertly along three edges to create a pocket into which the small blue rectangle could be put in and taken out. Sasha was extremely proud of his example and I was proud of him.

Happy teaching!

My house! A project in primary once more!

Crumbs #66 Shapes Project for Primary