DAY ONE

INTRODUCTIONS AND MUSIC

Today we came together for the first time as a group of 5 and 6 year olds to do music and drama.  We began our day with singing and clapping our names in a circle and then sang and played different percussion instruments to a song called ‘Listen to the Music 1, 2, 3’.  In these activities we watched and listened carefully to each other and took turns to play our different musical parts.  We also learnt an African welcome action song from Ghana.  We discovered we are quite a musical group with a couple of us already learning instruments – we have 2 violin players in our group!

WHAT IS DRAMA?

Next we talked about drama and what that is.  We agreed that doing drama is when you pretend to be someone else just like when we play.  Everyone shared their favourite type of play when they pretend they are someone else.  Some of the group’s favourite activities were playing mums and dads, playing spacemen flying rockets, playing shop owners and assistants, playing vets, and playing pets and their owners.

HOW DO PEOPLE HELP EACH OTHER? 

Next we talked about for our unit of work we are going to be doing some drama about people who help other people.  Everyone brainstormed ideas about people who help others and we drew pictures of some different types of helping people including: vets helping sick animals, Sue and Carole in the office, piano teachers, horse riding teachers, doctors, policemen, Sue in the library, firemen, karate teachers, and Mark our caretaker.

"doctors help sick people"

"my piano teacher helps me"

"a policeman catches robbers.  They keep our place safe"

"pilots help people travel safely"

"Sue helps us find our books and issues our books"

WHAT WOULD PEOPLE WHO WORK IN A HELPING COMPANY DO?

Next we talked about what a company is and the different types of work different companies do.  For example people who work in a bakery bake breads and cakes, and people who work in a post office sort and deliver mail.  We talked about what kind of skills people who worked in a helping company would need to have.  Here is what we came up with:

-Good at creative thinking so they can help come up with different ways to solve problems, maybe in a better or faster way.

-Good at listening to what the problem is.

-Good at noticing if someone needs help.

-Kind, helpful, nice, cool, happy, and smiley

-NED! – Never give up, encourage others, and do your best! (It was nice to see this learning from last term come up!)

A NAME FOR OUR COMPANY

Then we brainstormed some good names for a helping company in pairs and voted on the one we liked the best.  The names we came up with were:

The helping company

GNS helpers (one of the dads works at GNS!)

The sorting company

The creative helping company

Creative helpers

The Problem Solvers.

‘The Problem Solvers’ got the most votes, by a clear majority, so that is what our fictional helping company is going to be called.

CREATING OUR WORKSPACE

We then went in to role and imagined we were standing outside the building of ‘The Problem Solvers’.  When I asked the children what they could see this is what they said:

“what a big door!”

“it looks like it weighs a tonne”

“the building is all gold”

“look at the curly sign”

“look at the shiny windows, they are huge”

“there are dinosaur sculptures”

“there are tulips in the garden”

Then we unlocked the door and went inside…

“there are big rainbow coloured sofas”

“there are the telephones”

“there is the customer serving table”

“there is a security light”

“the computers are golden and the phones are too”

The children together built a beautiful picture of our company work space, we were all becoming quite excited about working in the golden building with the rainbow coloured couches!  Next we added signs to the classroom space so we could start to take more ownership of our space.  The children drew pictures of bookshelves, computers, ipods, phones, security lights, and even an ice-cream sundae maker that also made coffee and juice…later on in our work this ice cream sundae maker also had the ability to show us on a map where anyone was in the world if we needed to find out – very useful!

Here are some photos of the signs we made for our company office space:

A sign for our door.

A coffee machine

We received our call from Charlie Grinling on this phone.

Working at a computer.

GETTING OUR FIRST JOB!

We were ready to go into role as workers in our company.  We sat down at a table and had our first meeting.  One of the phones (that one of the children had drawn) rang and it turned out to be Charlie Grinling, Mr and Mrs Grinling’s (from the Lighthouse Keeper’s Lunch book series) nephew.

Making a moving image of a lighthouse with a moving light and foghorn.

This moving image had a spinning light at the front!

It turned out that Mr and Mrs Grinling had gone on holiday and left Charlie in charge of the cottage and the lighthouse.  Charlie needed help because he had lost his instructions and didn’t know what to do!  He hadn’t even managed to get the lighthouse lit last night and anything could have happened! We knew all about what needed to be done (we had spent some time reading the Lighthouse Keeper’s Lunch and played Ship to Shore doing all the different things the Lighthouse Keeper had to do eg. polish the light, turn on the foghorn, climb the stairs, scrub the decks, eat lunch etc).  The team quickly came up with lots of ideas on how we could help, this is what we did:

• Our company, The Problem Solvers, made a new set of instructions with pictures for Charlie.

• We packed our company van with sleeping bags and lots of other useful things, like food for the cat, so we could stay at the white cottage and help Charlie look after it.

• We visited Charlie and showed him all the instructions and explained what to do.

In role we cleaned the white cottage, did the gardening, fed the cat, made Charlie lunch and sent it in the basket down the line, helped Charlie polish the lighthouse light and put it on with the fog horn.  We had a lot of fun playing in the drama and everyone stayed in role really well.  The creative thinking and collective team work in the drama was fantastic.

One child's brainstorm plan of how we could help Charlie Grinling.

Here are some pictures from our set of instructions that we made for Charlie:

"you need to clean and polish the light and dry everything too"

"We can look after the garden at the cottage, and fix this window that is broken!"

"We will make Charlie's lunch for him and send it down the basket to the lighthouse!"

"Turn on the foghorn"

"Remember to tie up the boat so it doesn't float away!"

We really enjoyed our first day as ‘The Problem Solvers’, I wonder who our next client will be?