After all our work and research, we now need to seek permission from the Headmaster to realise our idea of wrapping the playground. How will we do that? How can we persuade him? This online session was mainly discussion. We listened carefully and patiently to each other and we discussed the matter of PERMISSION.
Some suggested we could Beg him to PLEASE allow us to wrap the playground!
We also thought we could actually PERSUADE him by making an argument FOR him to support this. We discussed the fact that we might send him a formal letter to explain:
What we are doing
Why we are doing it
Why we think he should say YES!
The children broke into 2 groups one would try to think of all the reasons why we should be allowed to wrap the playground and the other group would think of all the possible reasons why the headmaster might say ‘No’.
Before the debate began we discussed the idea of ADVERTISEMENTS and how they are used to PERSUADE us to buy or like something. We looked at the language they used; lots of ADJECTIVES to describe things. We looked at the sorts of colours they used to ATTRACT us.
THE ARGUMENT AGAINST:
We might be using a material that would rip and tear and it would not be successful…
A new playground covering would confuse the younger P1 children
People might slide around on it and fall.
Children would not be able to find their game markings for PE
No hopscotch / no snakes and ladders for playing and learning …
There’s nothing wrong with the yard so why wrap it?
THE ARGUMENT FOR:
It would be good for school visitors
It would be a beautiful, extraordinary sight and look amazing, bright and cheery
It would cause a lot of interest maybe from the newspapers and television!
It would be MEMORABLE
It would be fun
No one else would have wrapped their playground!
We could indeed collect footprints as patterns of movement for our project on PATTERN
All these great ideas could be used to write the letter to Mr Madine, the Headmaster.
I reminded the children of how CHRISTO and JEANNE-CLAUDE persuaded the authorities to allow them to realise their projects. Christo used documentation, plans and PHOTO-COLLAGES to show people what the idea would look like.
The children wanted to make their own photo-collages so Mrs Crummy gave out a black and white photocopy of a photograph of the school playground (some photographs taken from different angles, had been taken of the playground prior to the session and photocopied for each child). I explained to the children that they should look at the SHAPE of the playground and cut out a piece of material or several pieces to stick down to cover that shape. I showed them a hot-collage I had made. I didn’t have a picture of their playground but I did have picture of Croke Park, Dublin from a visit a few years ago. Here’s my vision of a wrapped Croke Park Pitch!
I explained how I had folded and creased the material to make the surface stand out:
The children used samples of fabric that we had used for testing to create their own vision of how the playground would look!
Look at the fantastic results!
Thank you P2/3 for all the great discussions and photo-collages!