Since January, we’ve had the privilege of working with 13 primary schools in Surrey and Hampshire, engaging 23 classes of children aged from 5 to 11 across 3 exciting creative projects:
We’ve teamed up again with the excellent Delight Charity to deliver our annual Delight in Dance programme. After watching our dance performance The Story Detectives, the children were challenged to create their own dance piece with us entitled ‘Heroes vs Villains’.
You can find out more about the Delight in Dance project here.
Gathering Place 360 Pilot Project
With support from Arts Partnership Surrey, we’ve also piloted a creative history intervention in primary schools linked to our Gathering Place 360 project.
Last autumn we created 360 films responding to four sites in Surrey, using the choreographic approaches that we’ve developed to bring archaeological sites and stories to life, especially places where it’s difficult to see what was once there because of no, or only limited standing remains. You can read more about our Bronze Age, Medieval, Tudor and World War I sites and the stories behind the films here.
In schools, young people aged 9-11 have watched the films on VR headsets, and explored objects from Surrey County Archaeological Unit’s Loan Boxes linked to the sites as the ‘inspiration point’ for the project.
“Amazing, brilliant, fantastic!”
“Best lesson ever!” (school participant feedback)
The children have then worked with us for an additional 4 or 5 weeks, immersing themselves in the history of one of the sites through dance and writing workshops - for which we were thrilled to welcome our writer-collaborator Anna Selby into the classroom with us - and completing tasks in a beautiful ‘Archaeologist Handbook’, designed by Jo Ogilvie (Sharp Pencil Design) with illustrations from Hannah Maiya-Mills (Paintbox). As a celebration of their hard work, the young people then used their own creative responses to build a live performance or film at the end of the project.
We also held community workshops at local libraries and community halls as part of this project, and will share our findings in another blog soon.
The SEED Schools Project Pilot
Most recently we’ve also worked with Delight Charity and with Hannah Maiya-Mills from Paintbox project to pilot a programme for children in Reception linked to our latest dance piece SEED, which explores the natural world around us and the changing seasons.
You can watch a short trailer for our schools project, which the brilliant Dan Martin created for us in week 1 of the programme, here:
Throughout the SEED schools pilot, we’ve been testing ways of bringing to life the Early Years and Foundation Stage ‘Understanding the World’ topic through dance and visual arts activities, especially exploring ways of developing the children’s awareness of the life cycle of a seed and the seasons. As with the Delight in Dance and Gathering Place 360 projects, we started with an ‘inspiration point’ - in this case a professional performance of SEED in the school hall. After this starting point, from decorating a plant pot and planting a seed in week 1 to creating huge sunflowers using collage techniques, everything the children have done with us has accumulated to create a sharing for their grown-ups, which they have thoroughly enjoyed.
The children have all impressed us with how settled they have seemed to be, even though we have been asking a lot of them, and really challenging their focus for example.
The seeds we planted with the children in week 1 have grown beautifully, just like their confidence, and we were so happy to be able to invite parents to be a part of this in the final week, with many grown-ups staying to create their own collages, expertly guided by the children themselves.
We are so grateful to our partner schools, St John's and Kingfield Primary Schools in Woking and Our Lady of the Rosary Primary School in Staines, for allowing us to try out our ideas for the SEED project pilot, and also to our other fantastic project partners Delight Charity (who also support us in the Delight in Dance project) and Paintbox. The SEED pilot was also supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.
The Gathering Place 360 project was commissioned by Arts Partnership Surrey and is being supported by Surrey County Archaeological Unit and Surrey County Council IoT and Emerging Technologies team.