Creative Tallis website

One of our challenges as a School of Creativity is to promote creative learning across the whole school. As a specialist arts college, we also have a commitment to sharing resources and ideas with our family of schools. Finally, we are keen to contribute to the national debate about the value of creative learning. Our Creative Tallis action research group has used a blog to keep communication going between meetings so the next logical step was to make a website that could gather together a whole range of evidence about creative learning all in one place. We chose Weebly, the free online web design application, to create the site and we have tried to use or highlight as many Web 2.0 tools as possible in order to demonstrate the ease and value of new tools for communication and presentation. The site has several pages, each with their own function and unique content. We will add to it and change the design on a regular basis to keep it fresh. We have a Creative Learning Forum so that visitors to the site can engage in a conversation with us. We would really like to know what you think about the site, especially if you have any constructive criticism to offer.

Year 7 Connections Day

We've just received the official documentary video of the Year 7 Cross-Curricular Connections Day that happened in April. Angus (Loaded Productions) has done a great job, in difficult circumstances, of capturing the rationale behind the day and the variety of activities that took place. I really like the student self-evaluations which demonstrate just how quickly they took to the idea of reflecting on the main themes, in relation to their learning, using new technologies. I'm looking forward to the Olympic Enterprise Day scheduled for Shine Week in July which has the even more ambitious brief of engaging the whole school!

Storytelling at Columbia 2

Our project kicked off with a grand storytelling day.

Didi Hopkins hosted 3 storytelling assemblies.

Storytelling at Columbia School

Since March, Didi Hopkins has been working alongside us to develop children and teacher's storytelling and storybuilding skills.

Didi is an experienced director and storyteller, more recently working with adults in the business sector. By the end of May, she will have met and worked with every child!

She has engaged the pupils at Columbia entirely and children are challenged to develop stories and dramas.

The workshops for each class, have been co-constructed by Didi, the children and the class teachers. The children have expressed to us a feeling of empowerment and teachers have shared that they are hoping to spread this way of working to other learning in their classes.