Session 7 began with a decision to wrap the children’s playground instead of the Dinner hall. The children were just as happy with this location so it did not seem to matter that the yard had got no votes on the last session!
I was not familiar with their playground so it was necessary for me to ask the children what they could recall about the playground.
What shape is it?
Who uses it?
Does Mr Madine use it?
It seems it was P2 / P3 playground but other classes use it too.
It was interesting to hear what they recall about the playground that they see everyday. They discussed what it was covered with and whether it was painted. I told the children that Christo and Jeanne-Claude found out as much as they could about the spaces they worked with, so we should do the same.
So then I suggested they go outside with a clipboard and paper and gather as much information as possible. We were connecting on FaceTime and so Mrs Crummy the teacher took the iPad outside so I too could travel outside with the group as they undertook their research!
The children organised themselves into 4 groups and with help from the classroom assistant Irma, divided the playground space into 4 sections using chalk lines. Each group would take a section and stand back to back to draw the playground from their perspective.
By doing this we would have many different views of the playground (just like our chair drawings from our previous session) and we would be able to bring all our drawings together later.
The children also measured the playground using footsteps and it was by pacing out the scale of the yard that they found the centre point for chalking…… very clever!
While all this was going on, I was noticing some amazing sounds through the iPad. I could hear children’s voices, footsteps and birds singing!
Back in the classroom we attempted to transfer our small drawings onto a much larger sheets so that we could joint all the parts together and have a large scale plan of the playground.
This was not such an easy task since the children had to negotiate the position from where they had drawn the playground… they needed to know the DIRECTION they faced….
When break time came, I had asked the children to notice something about the playground that they had not noticed before….
The children told me that thee were manholes, pipes at the corner, trees at the edges and that the playground was an irregular shape.
Once each group had transferred their information all 4 parts could be joined together…..
The children decided that the drawing / plan would be much nicer in colour as there were a lot of coloured markings in the playground.
One child observed that the tree they had drawn looked as if it was lying down. Mrs Crummy explained the idea of bird’s eye view… in this picture she is explaining how a bird would fly over the playground and view a tree… from the top!