Invitations to Play

After my first attempt at an invitation to play, I've been practising. The extra time and money I put in to make it look more "inviting" didn't really pay off. I bought a cheap $2 shop tablecloth, so cheap that when I opened it, it was practically transparent! Along with the tablecloth I bought some little plastic containers for pebbles, they look cheap but I couldn't afford the nice wooden bowls I had imagined on the table, and plastic picture frames because I decided that would provide a nice border for the children to create images inside. I'll start checking out second hand shops for more natural looking things to place on the tables but for now the cheap plastic stuff will have to do.
I think it's working out okay so far. It's only been twice more that I've set up invitations to play, while some of the class are at Sports Academy. The children are loving it. 
I am too, but...
BIG butt, so big it overhangs the chair,
I have to try not stress about the little things! Oh my goodness, I am looking around the room and it's a pigsty, and I'm thinking holy heck, how are we going to get that all cleaned up before the bell?
And the other thing I do is get all upset about "stuff" getting wasted! I try to not say anything, and let them do what they want with what is provided, but where they see just another scrap of paper, or just another vivid marker, or felt tip, or glue gun stick, I'm seeing "useful stuff that well looked after will last" because that's how I was raised. Coming from a background where as children, my sister and I had very little, we treasured everything we did have, and we looked after things. As an adult I really struggle with the whole "disposable society" thing. I save stuff because it either cost money, or took time to collect or gather. To see things being destroyed or wasted does upset me.
Today I put some items out as an invitation to play, and I had two polystyrene trays (which I'd cut into squares) to create prints with. This is going to sound ridiculous, but I was really annoyed when one of my students sat there and proceeded to bend them all in half, so they were no good for printmaking anymore. "It's just a polystyrene tray," I tell myself. But I only had those trays because my husband bought Turkish for dinner for my birthday. We rarely dine out due to his food allergies, and being vegan, we obviously can't collect meat trays.
Speaking of vegan (I'll post photos after so you can see what I'm talking about) I've had this gel printing kit for ages and never been able to bring myself to actually make the gel plate because it's made with gelatine. I decided I'd mix it up last week. Isla, one of my students, is vegetarian, and she helped me. We both sat there, mixing and gagging and carrying on, it truly smelt disgusting and we felt bad for the poor animals who were in there... but again, I didn't want to waste the kit, so we persevered, all the while holding our breath, and the result was actually pretty cool. I'm wondering if we could make one with agar agar.
While walking along the beach, I decided to collect smooth pebbles and driftwood - which ended up taking hours, for another idea I had. At least this cost nothing, and who is going to complain about walking along the beach! I'll post the photos now.

Driftwood & pebbles, a photo of a baby ladybird (ugly little thing) and information about ladybirds. I also had the hot glue gun at the ready, along with paint and frames to create within.

Some students required many pebbles!

Isla decided  this piece looked like a pointing hand

These boys saw... a catamaran!

Shaiyan created a butterfly and painted a background

Ella made ladybirds on a piece of wood

The finished catamaran, but awesome, because they were discussing balance and whether or not it will float. I had to rummage through my "stuff" to find a piece of fabric for the sail. The paint will probably come off in the water, so I told them to wait until I can find the right sealer/varnish for it before testing its flotation capabilities!

This is not an invitation, but you'd think it was! My new punishment! I'm just adding this in because I always wanted to make a sensory jar, and I saw this idea on ....Pinterest of course! I altered the poem a little. Great, now my little cherubs can calm themselves down watching some nice sparkly glitter, which takes 4 minutes 18 seconds to drop to the bottom (the children timed it several times). Unless you give it a little shake up before the last bits land! Everyone loves this, it's not even being used as time out, it's just a nice thing to watch, especially in the sunlight.

The gel plate, made from bits of animals, gross.  Also included were various bits and pieces for print making, and now they all know the rolly thing is called a brayer.

Invitation inspired by artist Chris Piascik. Check out the abandoned design, obviously child did not wish to persevere, but I'm just thinking "wasteful of nice sheet of blue paper"

Before the children got to the table! I did a couple of swirly lines to get them started / inspire / guide their thinking just a little bit!

We moved the chalkboard table that I painted last year and I put out nice new chalk and started drawing a table setting, this was a success, they kept coming up and adding to it, I didn't get a final photo though.

This print looks much more awesome in real life, it was her second one off the same plate.

Prints created so far

I'm thinking black silhouette images printed or painted over these, or maybe zentangle like designs with black vivid, or rip them up and create a collage... limitless possibilities!

Lamb of God Lyrics Stuck in my Head!

Today is International Slayer day. I love Slayer.
Today, for the first time ever, I created "an invitation to play" with a "provocation" set up on a table, and the whole time I kept thinking of the lyrics to a Lamb of God song called Redneck that goes, "this is a m.....f..... invitation..." and it's a very lucky thing that I did not start singing such things out loud in the classroom. It was still going through my head when I got home. Right now I am listening to Slayer though.
So after researching Leslee's comments about setting up invitations to play, and thinking about how such things could be used in a senior class, I decided that since I was devoting our day to calendar art, I would set up an invitation to play for early finishers if they so desired.
I chose art because that's what we were all doing anyway. I printed off a picture of Paul Klee, with birth and death date underneath, which I stuck in a frame. I printed off facts about him, and pictures of some of his artworks, including Once Emerged from the Grey of Night (1918). I placed a jar of water, sketch wash pencils, vivid markers, HB pencils, rulers, watercolours, brushes and several different types of paper, as well as textured wallpaper, on the table. I took a photo.

And as an afterthought, added a tin of watercolour crayons as well.
Isla finished her calendar art and asked what the table was set up for. I bit my tongue, tempted as I was to start singing. I said she could play with whatever she liked there, if she wanted to. After quite some time she started to paint pictures of pineapples (her favourite, she always put pineapples in her artwork when she can!) and other fruit. She then painted a background inspired by In the Style of Kairouan which actually looked pretty cool on the wallpaper sample. She cut out her fruit pictures and glued them on, then moved on to another piece inspired by Once Emerged from the Grey of Night. Meanwhile, a group of three boys joined her at the table. They were keen to paint too. I was interested to see what they would choose to do.

They each took a sheet of cartridge, and proceeded to draw, then paint in watercolour, not something inspired by a Paul Klee piece, but the image on the tin of watercolour crayons! They didn't even open the tin, which you can see in the image above.
So there you go, they did play! Just not how I expected they would.
I will do this again, next time I will add more variety and choice of media, and maybe several artists but choose 1 theme. I'll have a think. It was pretty easy to set up and they were totally engaged in what they were doing which was nice. But then it is probably just this group of kids, they enjoy and are interested in everything!

Mantle Off Track but Terribly Fun

I have a whole bunch of photos so I'm going to have to sift through and locate the most relevant ones to tell the story!
Mantle has kind of morphed into a huge problem solving almost escape room type thing which the children are loving and I'm having heaps of fun putting together.
My initial plan has gone way off track but that's ok because the learning that's happening is amazing, everyone is fully engaged, and the other curriculum areas are being implemented as well.
While trying to figure out how I could bring in a few pre planned "tensions" I had a moment that went like this...
I was intending to give the "company" a cloze reading activity using a newspaper article about sneakers made from ocean plastic, but it just didn't fit with who they (the company) are, why on earth would they be doing cloze reading activities? The phone went ring ring (that was me saying "ring ring, ring ring") I picked up the phone (which is just two pieces of pvc pipe stuck together) and had a conversation with ... Great Aunt Myrtle! I made it up as I went along and the children were all so excited, like it was real, and Great Aunt Myrtle has evolved into a crazy but helpful old dear who has a liking for puzzles and mysteries.
It turned out she had spilt her cup of tea on the article, so the company had to figure out the words from a code and put them in the right places. The clues started off simple enough, but whenever anyone looked like they were almost there, I found I could draw it out a little further by adding in extra problems to solve along the way. The class loved it so much, they wanted to do more of the same the next day. So I invented Polly Ethylene, the evil, devious owner of a plastic bag manufacturing factory. We had to hack her "acebook" account and shut her down as she had a large group of followers who were opposed to not having the option of plastic shopping bags at the supermarket (for various ridiculous reasons, some of them real) but it turns out she also has an evil plot to do more environmental damage, and unethical plans for the future, so our company have been working through a whole bunch of clues and riddles to discover the evidence that will lead to her arrest.  The clues have involved so much awesome maths and literacy, and the children are so into it! They managed to find the box with the plan, which had a combination lock on it. They succeeded in opening the lock, only to find the evidence in a jar with another lock! The evidence once they crack that lock is in code too, and the clue for the code was in the box but they can't figure out what that clue is for... yet! It's been so much fun, and they've discovered morse code, braille, binary and semaphore, worked with fractions, time and measurement problems, grids and coordinates, place value, plus had to solve lots of riddles. And I'm having so much fun watching them problem solve and work together!
It's funny, Murgatroyd, the original pretend person we were dealing with who started us off with our first commission, has kind of faded into oblivion. I had to send a pretend email from him to the company the other day just to remind them of his existence and that he does actually have expectations that we have agreed to meet! But there is nothing like an evil villain to make things more exciting!

The first code, the one that started it all!

Fake email... printed paper stuck over the computer screen!

Binary code giving them instructions as to where they might find the next clue

This was from a really cool app I found. It took them a while to solve, another photo further below you can see properly...

And once they had gathered all three digits, it was only a matter of time before they got the right combination

Everyone wanted to have a go!

Oh no, another combination lock!

Turn it and look at it on an angle, it says look under the chair. There were sticky notes under chairs, only one gave the actual clue though.

This riddle took quite some time to figure out and resulted in every book being removed from the bookshelf. Great Aunt Myrtle had to call and give a little hint.

The novel we are currently reading as a class, Holes.

Yes, I actually lined up the text and cut out all the little windows