Biscuit Business!
Enquiry: Biscuit Business! How can we develop children’s creative and imaginative thinking to improve their problem solving skills across the curriculum?
Christ the King RC wanted to find out how children can apply their creativity to problem solving exercises across the curriculum. Problem solving is a fundamental aspect of work in many jobs/careers and these skills need to be developed so that the children gain the experience and the confidence to solve problems and deal with new unforeseen challenges. An important aspect of this work is being able to work as part of a team and organise the work within the team. This needs the children to be able to recognise not only their own skills but the skills of others that they are working with.
They want the children to understand the real and relevant importance of what they learn through the curriculum by applying it to specific ‘real life’ tasks. This should help in motivating the children to participate and ultimately succeed in completing the task.
The aim is for children to recognise the skills and attributes they need to successfully complete a task/project and how this can be related to jobs and careers in the world of the workplace. This corresponds directly with the ECM aim of achieving economic wellbeing which is a school priority. This project will help pupils understand that their school learning is useful to them in their future workplace.
Christ the King RC’s Enquiry and now Change school programme kick started with ‘A City Adventure’ led by partner’s Stan’s Cafe – over 90% of the school staff took part in this training day which took participants on a journey of discovery around Birmingham City Centre, encouraging them to take risks as an essential element of creativity.
Then year 6 classes started their enterprise challenge, led by Year 6 teachers, Grainne and Theresa. Stan’s Cafe worked with both classes to plan and film television adverts.
In the first session with the Christ the King RC entrepreneurs, Stan’s Cafe ran a 2 hour session which explored notions of Value, covering monetary value, ethical values and personal values. The intention was that they will be able to refer back to this session when they are first considering the concept of what their product will be. This was an ambitious agenda but all involved believe with carefully chosen examples and tasks, the pupils would be able to grasp these comparatively sophisticated ideas.
Each team was supplied with a formal list of requirements they must supply for the production of their advertisement.
During the second and third days with the project Stan’s worked with each team individually. They explained the concept of their advertisement and worked with Stan’s Cafe moulding this into a viable plan and generate a list of action points that would be delivered upon for shooting the advertisement the following week.
During the fourth and fifth days in school all the advertisements were shot. As there will be up to 10 advertisements the filming schedule was very tight and unforgiving. This was explained to the year 6 pupils and the groups whose ideas were over ambitious or under prepared would be life with weak advertisements! Another example of trying to prepare their pupils for the ‘real world!’
Reflection from Adam Hardy (Head teacher), Grainne Carew (lead year 6 teacher) and James from Stan’s Cafe.
Our Enquiry Programme kicked off with a whole staff “City Adventure Day” with Stan’s Cafe. This gave the school staff an excellent introduction to the possibilities of working in partnerships to develop creative teaching and learning, and to explore personalised learning styles etc. The Enquiry project was then planned as part of a Year 6 scheme of work, and was an excellent way to kick start Christ the King RC’s working with Bright Space and Stan’s Cafe. Grainne (year 6 teacher) commented that when her and Therese (other year 6 teacher) talked about their ideas for the project at a staff meeting and (we think because of the city adventure) the staff continued to be interested in what was happening, what was going on. The staff interest is so good that we hope that for the change school programme – they will jump at chances to take part and not be scared of the whole process.
Year 6 teachers were keen to develop a real time learning cross curricular project to link into the Enquiry project, that has a relevance to the ‘real world’. The project was ambitious and in hindsight we would have honed it down, fine tuned the expected learning outcomes/objectives to allow for more experimentation for both staff and pupils.
The project most definitely improved/developed problem solving for staff and children – it was on ongoing project that encouraged teachers to take a risk and try something new – children also said recently in class that what they really enjoyed was the problem solving elements.
Real time learning – Pupils experienced the world of business, from having meetings, listening to each other. One of the many maths elements was the costings of the ingredients, e.g. you don’t use a whole bag of sugar in one batch of biscuits, so when costing/budgeting, you wouldn’t use a bag of sugar each time- if you made 5 batches – you would only still use 1 bag and one box of eggs. If they did this the profit margin gets greater – use and application of maths – very good, and the way the different groups worked together to ‘get their heads round budgets’! For next time we need to spend more time on setting real deadlines, shared with all the participants, pupils, staff and artists.
Staff also benefited greatly from ‘sitting back and watching’ the groups and discussing what learning was going on. At times staff were expecting things to run a lot quicker.
“We used to argue all the time, we now like working as a team” – team 1 quote. Adam asked the ‘smirk’ group – “would you like to work like this again?” – they all said yes – boys and girls together.
In the ‘smirk group’ there was a majority of ‘shyer’ children, but they came out of their shell and they were also the only group to come up with a different company name to a biscuit name….
The quality of the finished advertisements surprised the school staff and so fuelled both pupil self esteem and inspired enthusiasm for their creative Change School programme for the coming 3 years.
Team building was developed greatly within this project, within all elements- from working with the year 6 teachers, to the cooking, to the filming.
Christ the King RC's enquiry project was also generously supported by RAIK (Kingstanding Education Action Zone)