“I am a year 3 teacher at Moorthorpe Primary School and I have heard about your wonderful workshops and wondered if you be able to do a workshop with us please? We are going to be learning about Climate Change and Sustainability and it would be fabulous to have a workshop around this and would be great if we could tie it to a story too!”
We love it when an email like this lands in our inbox! Our SCRAPtastic Stories workshops are absolutely PERFECT for learning about Climate Change and Sustainability using story as a prompt and inspiration for independent artworks, so this week we headed over to Moorthorpe with ‘Rosie Revere Engineer’, a brilliant picture book about a young girl who uses her inventiveness, her creativity, and resourcefulness to make marvellous machines to change the world for friends and family. She sees a problem, and with a little engineering imagination she creates machines that make a difference. And that is exactly what Year 3 did!
“The workshop was an excellent opportunity for collaboration, creative thinking and oracy skills. It complemented our current theme and was great to work in conjunction with our book-driven learning.”
The workshop began by reading Rosie Revere Engineer by Andrea Beaty. We linked the book to their curriculum topic of Climate Change and after hearing Rosie’s challenges, the children shared the problems the world is currently facing and the solutions we can all be a part of. Little steps change the world and through child-led discussion students developed a deeper understanding about their role on the impacts on our environment. It’s a joy to see the children realise that the little steps they take every day: turning taps off, saving energy, walking to school, re-using materials and recycling; change the world. They have the power to make a difference and it’s inspiring to know that.
“The session was clearly explained in a professional, calm, child-friendly manner; fairandfunky spoke respectfully but excitedly to our children encouraging them to work collaboratively and think deeply. The children were engaged and enthused throughout!”
Working in pairs, the students were then challenged to be like Rosie! It was their turn to become creative thinkers and engineers as they built machines to combat climate change from recycled materials. The classroom became a hubbub of creativity with discussions on sustainability issues buzzing around – from how to clean up the oceans, to combating floods, reducing pollution and improving areas for wildlife. The enthusiasm was tangible, and as children shared their models at the end of the workshop, we discovered they’d created robots that eat rubbish, boats that suck litter from the oceans and turn it into compost, rockets that take out pollution from the atmosphere, wildlife bridges, magnetic lights that work to cool the planet and much more! Let’s hope that one day these future scientists put their ideas into real life situations and take even bigger steps to change the world.
“The children loved hearing the story as a hook into the session and were enthusiastic about creating inventions together. The resources and session were well organised, followed a good pace and was all prepped ready – no preparation required for school which was extremely helpful! We’re so glad we found out about fairandfunky.” Year 3 teacher at Moorthorpe Primary School.
To book a workshop for your school please email helen@fairandfunky.com
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