One of the challenges I issued myself after my visit to NIST was to be more mindful of unpacking Primary Years Programme (PYP) attitudes with my class.
The class is currently exploring a unit of inquiry into ‘Cultures express themselves through the Arts.’ The children have been looking at this concept through lens of photography as they prepare a portfolio of photos of their lives in Singapore for a global exhibition of children’s photography. While the children have thinking carefully of the subjects they will create for this exhibition, this unit is also one where the children have been developing their visual communication skills.
One of the challenges of photography with this age group is moving the kids to really thinking through what they want to communicate before they hit capture. As one of the attitudes we I used the first 3 minutes of a brilliant Ted Talk by Louie Schwartzberg to get the kids to think about what makes this photographer so creative. The class couldn’t help but notice that he was very calm and patient. They also noticed that this photographer’s creativity enabled them to see our world from a new and different perspective.
Building on their previous photographic challenges where the children were looking through mathematical lens of patterns, lines and angles to improve their photography, I challenged the children to use their creativity to capture scenes from ‘the Secret World of Nexus.’ The brief was to create photos of beauty in the school that are hidden away from because we don’t take the time to notice them.
The results of this learning engagement are in the photos in this post. Back in the class and the children reflected on how the were creative during the photo shoot while I reflected back to the process of using the inspiration I witnessed in another school to improve children’s learning in the class I teach.
Teaching the Teacher 
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