“In Primary 1 we are keen to develop relationships with our families. In Primary 1 we focus a lot of our teaching on Froebelian principles and practices as well as his occupations and gifts therefore we thought that focusing our family learning sessions on clay would encourage families to get creative with their children. Clay is an integral part of day to day provision in the P1 setting so children have daily access to use it. Primary 1 do not get to use iPads a lot in class unless it was for a set game or letter formation practice so we thought to support learning it would be ideal to combine iPads and clay for our family learning. This means that everyone, child and family member, learned something new on the iPad together and these new skills can be used again in other areas of learning, in class and out side of school.”

What did you do?

“Primary 1 families signed up to the clay sessions which ran from 2-3pm for 3 weeks. A lot of grandparents came along to the sessions too as it was during school hours, it was really nice to see the grandparent and child relationships and everyone working together to share ideas/ create the videos.

Session 1 was the gathering ideas and planning week. We developed rough ideas of claymation and gathered these onto a storyboard using the MarkUp feature on iPad. Some families chose to use paper and pens which was also readily available to them. They watched some videos of digital leaders, our experienced P7 helpers, with their own claymation videos which used the Stop Motion Studio app.

Session 2 was all about creating videos. We did a brief introduction on how to use app and using clay to create their storyboard idea with Stop Motion Studio app. Most families completed their video in this session so were able to Airdrop to the digital leaders who shared these on the screen.

Celebration and sharing successes came in week 3 when we gave everyone the opportunity to share their video on large screen. Lots of confident individuals in P1 spoke out in front of the entire room and shared their ideas behind their videos! Week 3 was also an opportunity to catch up for those still in need of some support or those who had missed weeks, the digital leaders were on hand to support these families.”