How to Wow: Day 3

4th in a series of posts describing and reflecting on the experience of delivering a ‘wow project’.
How to Wow: Introduction
How to Wow: Day 1
How to Wow: Day 2
How to Wow: Day 3
How to Wow: Day 4
How to Wow: Closing thoughts

This was our riskiest day, both in terms of having to get various logistics right and also in terms of not knowing how the special agents would react.

I started the day by saying I didn’t know what else we were supposed to do next and maybe it would be good if the special agents could write a report to Agent A (my boss) explaining what they had done so far and what they thought we should do next.

report

It’s always good to have little snapshots of how people are interpreting what’s going on, but this was basically a distraction to allow Skatz to get into position at the far end of the playing field that both classrooms look out onto. At the pre-arranged time the blinds went up and a message came over from the other classroom that there was a stranger outside.

A Song for Skatz: a stranger arrives from nikkipugh on Vimeo.

I love that this was our massive “look kid! Skatz has arrived” moment and the over-riding priority for some of them is still to show me something they’ve written that they’re proud of!

Other things that happened in the video:
at 0:51 some of the special agents have realised they can get a better view of what’s going on if their teacher lets them go in through the other door.
at 1:03 you can catch a glimpse of Agent P, one of the special agents who always liked a bit of extra responsibility, returning from his mini-mission of being sent to find the headmaster and tell him what was going on.
at 1:30 we have the headmaster’s pronouncement that the stranger looks friendly, so we know everything’s going to be OK!
1:52 Skatz and I had worked out as part of the back-story that because he came from a place that had been dark for a very long time, the practical way of greeting people was to touch them on the head.

After Skatz had greeted everybody, been fetched something to drink, been offered somewhere to sit down and had done some comedy “what’s this do?” clomping around with the printer and interactive whiteboard stuff, he settled down to describe his journey and explain about what life was like on his planet. [I had to obscure some of the faces on this video – hence the blurriness.]

A song for Skatz: Skatz introduces himself from nikkipugh on Vimeo.

As I mentioned before, we’d used the project wiki to build up a fairly comprehensive list of details concerning Skatz’s background, what life was like for him and how/why he had travelled to the school. Watch that video again and be impressed at how the whole thing doesn’t get de-railed by Agent Alex asking Skatz how come he has a watch. (Full credit to Skatz for that!)

Watch again and note how at that point the conversation changes from being information being delivered by Skatz to being information being imparted by the special agents. It was beautifully surreal when they spontaneously started chanting out the months of the year and days of the week. Priceless.

We told Skatz about the song that had come through in the message and we asked if he could sing us the bit that had got garbled at the end. This is when we found out that the reason Skatz had come to the school was because they minstrels on his planet had forgotten the end of the song. They use to sing a song that had all the information about light and shadows in it and they would sing it every morning. When they stopped, that’s when the sunlight disappeared. Skatz needed our help to re-write the song so he could take the knowledge back to his planet.

Skatz told us he’d only got 2 sleeps’ worth of time before the inter-dimensional tear opened up again and he had to go back to his planet…

After the special agents had had the initial 20-30 minutes talking to Skatz we split up into 4 groups again and rotated around 4 different activities. We only had a couple of hours in which to get some practical experience of the learning objectives before we then focused on developing the vocabulary associated with them.

Here’s a quick outline of the 4 activities and the learning objectives associated with them. Int he planning sages these had been grouped together around themes and a general approach and then the exact nature of the activity put together once Skatz had joined the team and the overall narrative had been formed.

Feed the Spiders

  • Recognise that light comes from a variety of sources
  • Shadows are formed when the light is blocked
  • Compare shadows
  • Use knowledge of materials to predict shadows
  • Opaque objects do not let light through; transparent objects let a lot of light through

opaque

semi-transparent

Skatz had bought 2 spiders with him, but they had been asleep ever since the light diappeared. The special agents had to find out what made them wake up (they were solar-powered, needing a very strong light source). After waking them up, the special agents had to investigate what affect leaves made from different materials (opaque, transparent, semi-transparent) had on them.

What shape are shadows?

  • Shadows are formed when the light is blocked
  • Shadows are similar in shape to the objects forming them
  • Compare shadows from different objects
  • Use knowledge of materials to predict shadows

shadows

So he wouldn’t get scared when they suddenly appeared again when the light came back, the special agents needed to be able to explain to Skatz about how shadows are made and why they sometimes look scary.

We took lamps into one of the cloakrooms and made outlines of everyday objects. By moving the cut-outs closer and further away to the lamps we made the shadows get bigger and more faint and smaller and more dark. When we turned the cut-outs at an angle they made distorted, scary shapes we could use to tell stories.

Can we tell the time with shadows?

  • Shadows can be used to tell the approximate time of day
  • The sun is the main source of daylight
  • The sun appears highest in the sky at midday
  • The sun appears to move/the apparent movement of the sun is caused by the earth rotating on its axis
  • When the sun is behind, the shadow is in front
  • Describe a fair test
  • Measure length
  • Compare shadows

shadow lengths

Apart from needing to know when two sleeps’ time is up, if Skatz is the only person in his world with a watch, he will have to teach the other people how to tell the time using shadows.

The special agents used the torches from their investigation packs to model the movement of the sun around an object and work out the relationship between the position of the sun and the position and length of the shadow.

Skatz

interview

The fourth activity was spending time with Skatz to find out more about his life and his job as a minstrel. The special agents were encouraged to ask questions and make use of the notepads from their investigation packs.

How do we turn this knowledge into a song?

vocabulary

songs

The afternoon was split into two sessions with each class spending half their time on collating and understanding vocabulary related to the morning’s activities and the other half of their time working with Skatz to understand how songs are built.

What we learned

  • The write-a-message-to-Agent-A-and-please-don’t-look-out-of-the-window exercise highlighted some interesting contrasts in expectations in how polished written work – any written work – should be. (cf drawing and mark-making.)
  • Don’t assume any particular type of reaction to a situation.
  • Things get interesting if you put the pupils in the position of being the expert.
  • They will notice even the tiniest of details. Example: the battery inside Skatz’s guitar. Be prepared to improvise!
  • Given the chance, I would organise the morning activities differently:
    1. I think most of the staff involved only saw the notes I prepared on the morning in question. As a result, they were not very confident with the material. This was compounded by them also having requested that the staff travel around the activities with the same group all the time, therefore having to deliver 4 activities from scratch rather than repeating just one and being able to develop it.
    2. That we were solely relying on the notes I had written the week before to communicate what people had to do was a problem – this is why we ideally needed some sort of final training session with all the staff together.
    3. The lack of confidence of the staff in delivering the activities meant that I had to take on a floating role (moving from activity to activity checking that everything was ok) rather than playing a more active role in delivering. Not good.
    4. An alternative to this would have been to have brought in another person to co-deliver, but we didn’t have the budget for this either.
    5. After the day’s delivery, feedback from the teachers was that they wanted more time spent on the activities. This again relates to the points above and things not being slick enough to have really used the allotted time effectively, but also prompts the question of why this had not been broached during the planning stages – again, the importance of having open channels of communication such that everyone involved participates in the planning and things like this can be caught ahead of time.
  • For some of the activities we’d planned on doing them outside (especially the telling the time with shadows one). The weather was rainy though so we couldn’t. A lot of what we did had to be double-planned for different weather conditions.
  • If the staff do feel they need to revisit the practical side of the activities, I’m curious to know if they will use the same activities (solar-powered spiders in drain pipes etc – they still have all the equipment) or whether they will revert to whatever they would have used previously…
  • Within a limited amount of time, how do you balance expectations of covering the curriculum vs all the other stuff (narrative etc) that turns the project into a wow project?
  • Re telling the time with shadows: We discovered that text books typically illustrate this with diagrams that start with the sun rising on the left hand side and coming down on the right, presumably as a result of us reading in a left-to-right direction. In this topic though, teachers also have to talk about the sun rising in the East and we conventionally depict this as being on the right-hand arm of a compass cross. Confusing.
  • Anagrams and reversals are a fun way of naming distant planets and far off lands. Skatz came from a town called Nednil; the special agents studied at Linden.

4th in a series of posts describing and reflecting on the experience of delivering a ‘wow project’.
How to Wow: Introduction
How to Wow: Day 1
How to Wow: Day 2
How to Wow: Day 3
How to Wow: Day 4
How to Wow: Closing thoughts