Thursday February 28 was a very special day at Maria Regina Catholic Primary School in Avalon, on Sydney’s Northern Beaches. It was the day that Dr Bronwen Wade-Leeuwen (Macquarie University) and I worked with the whole school on a STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts & Mathematics) project titled Bring back the Arts.
Here is a reflection from Dr Wade-Leeuwen …
The primary school students (approximately 110 children) loved creating their street chalk artworks around the school’s theme of ‘Love’ on the playground area.
They enjoyed being collectively photographed in their year groups by you together with their street chalk artworks.
A wonderful example of how ‘Bringing back the Arts’ through STEAM approaches can generate critical and creative thinking in contemporary active learning environments. The school’s theme of ‘Love’ directly supports the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of working collaboratively with industry and institutions (school and university) towards ‘Partnerships for the Goals’
The final session for the day was with the senior students (Years 4-6), this session showed the students courage, creativity and determination to quickly learn new skills using Adobe Spark technology through the planning and engineering of their artwork images, videos and voice recordings into amazing professional productions to share with others.
The day began with a Big Draw exercise based on the theme of LOVE and the Sustainable Development Goals as set by the United Nations General Assembly in 2015.
Each grade level had a set of goals to learn and draw about.
The Grade 4 to 6 students documented their drawings with their iPads by taking a range of photos and videos.
In the afternoon, I worked with the the older students to help them turn their images and videos into video a range of video stories using Adobe Spark Video.
It was great to see how quickly the students mastered the app and developed a range of creative stories.
Special thank you to Kathy Gee, the Principal, her teaching staff and Dr Wade-Leeuwen for making this day a possibility.
Stay tuned for a video about this day on CreateEdu TV.
Dr Tim Kitchen's Journal - Creativity in Education 