Today, the whole school from P1 to P7 took part in a collaborative writing activity.  For the last hour of the day, the pupils moved around to be in mixed age groups. Each group was then assigned a piece of plastic, found on a  recent beach clean at Rockcliffe. The groups worked as teams to describe what the object looked like before moving on to the more imaginative part of the task – the children were asked to pretend they were  archaeologists living in the future, 200 years from now; they were to pretend they lived in times when plastic no longer is in use and also that they did not know what the object actually was.  This was a challenging task but there were some great ideas. For example, one group, who were given a purple bottle lid, decided that it could be a tiny bowl for a very small pet which had chewed its rim!  Another group described a polythene bag, with a ringed opening, as a moveable toilet for a pet on dog walks! A large traffic cone was imagined as a hat for special occasions, worn by a Giant called Big Foot. And, the pink felt lining from a training shoe was imagined as the tongue from a teddy bear….There were lots more ideas like this and folks will be able to see them all in our Future Museum event, to be held towards the end of term.  Watch this space for more information about this soon.

Not only was today’s activity a great opportunity for the children to work with new people of different ages, collaboratively, but it also gave our learners a new context in which to apply their prior learning and skills.  One teacher commented how impressed she was with how the pupils demonstrated such confidence with using the descriptive bubbles, as  taught through the Stephen Graham approach to writing. Well done all! And, of course, this activity built awareness about how much plastic ends up in our oceans and how long it can stay there, posing a real danger to wildlife.  An important environmental message was delivered to the whole school today, thanks to this partnership venture by Rotakids and the School Eco Group.