Paganel Home Week Project

Started a 5 session project at the school today with Bobbie Gardner with the overiding theme of 'home and identity.' Worked with Year 3 first, but lost some time due to an over-running assembly. Having said that, we achieved lots of good stuff in the time available. Started with ice-breakers and a couple of games to try and get some of the children's names (which I'm rubbish at remembering) and then began sharing our thoughts of what 'home' means to us. Initally, during the planning stages, there was a bit of concern that the group would only be able to grasp literal interpretations of this, but there were some lovely ideas ('laughter' and 'food' come to mind). The children seemed to really understand what was being asked of them and even the literal ideas were thoughtlful ('stairs' and ' teddies'). We had been warned that the group could be a challenge in terms of their abilities but, fingers crossed it will continue, we felt that there was no issue with this.

The teacher and TA both involved themselves in the session which was great and splitting the group down into two smaller groups for part of the session worked really well as some of the children get a bit fidgety when listening for too long.

Bobbie and i also shared our ideas of 'home' with three items which we had each bought in (mine: grandad's medals, a book, a photo of the garden; and Bobbie': Sainsbury's bag (!), family photo and headphones) and the children seemed to respond really well to this.

We also set-up groundrules with the children which they then signed to say they agreed with and this proved useful to bring them back to when they started to get animated.

Spent a short time at the end of the session in two groups - mine visually representing someone's home story through freeze-framing, and Bobbie's doing the same through sound and rhythm.

Overall a great start to the project as, although we didn't achieve much in terms of actual performance, the time was well spent getting the children to share ideas and getting all of us to interract together. The feedback from the children was positive, although some of them struggled to identify specific things they had enjoyed (rather than the whole of the session) but the performances seemed to top the list of specifics (which is no suprise, really!)

Looking forward to next Monday!