Hi everyone,
After showing the children the video: "Caine's Arcade" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faIFNkdq96U) they were overwhelmingly inspired by his creativity and the idea of creating something so brilliant out of cardboard. The documentary maker has since creating the "Imagination Foundation' to support innovation in children around the world. There is a global cardboard challenge coming up in October and the global day of play on October 5th that we are also inspired by.
We are embarking on a whole-school mini inquiry into sustainability with the tagline: Places: who cares, what matters? and the idea of creating our own Year One Arcade fits in perfectly. Arcades are places that bring children and adults much happiness as it taps into the universal human need for play, laughter and happiness. We have learnt a lot about happiness and how we can change our feelings and the feelings of others. Fun and games are very important to sustaining our sense of happiness and personal well-being.
Furthermore, many children have identified the environment as something that is very important to them and so it is apparent that forests and nature are places that matter to us. We will be investigating how cardboard and paper are made and what we can do to sustain our forests and environment. Creating an arcade by up-cycling and reusing boxes and recycled materials will support our learning about reducing, reusing and recycling.
We are considering holding a pop-up arcade at this year's Bazaar to showcase our arcade games and bring further happiness to parents and children of our school community. The children will engage in a debate as to whether our arcade should be free to all or have a cost involved and what they think the money should go towards for the school. They will be conducting a toy audit at home to see how many toys they use and how many they don't use to reflect on waste and disposal of plastics and to potentially donate some unused toys as prizes for the arcade.
The children will be writing procedural texts, drawing labelled diagrams for their game designs, creating a model prototype, giving each other feedback and re-designing, and learning about construction. They will need to create instructions, signs, posters, tokens, and there will be a lot of problem solving involved.
Being part of the world-wide movement for creativity and innovation and creating something that will bring happiness to ourselves and others is all part of being a good global citizen. We will be learning more about what it means to be a good local and global citizen. The children discovered that at their age they cannot really volunteer in the community but there are many other ways to be a good citizen.
HOW YOU CAN HELP:
1. If you have access to cardboard boxes of any shapes and sizes PLEASE start bringing them in. We are currently having a closing down sale of our Happy Shop in order to make space for an arcade workshop in the Art Studio.
2. If you have some ideas and skills in making things work and building things out of cardboard then we could really use your help to support the children's designs and construction of their games. Please have a look at our weekly timetable (it will be posted this week) to see when learning agreement is on or chat to one of the teachers.
3. During the school holidays please try and take your child to Intensity or Time Zone or any other arcade so that they can get inspiration for their own arcade games. Have a chat to them about how they might create such games using cardboard boxes.
Read about the value of creativity: http://imagination.is/why-creativity/value-of-creativity/
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