• CREATIVITY,  EDUCATION,  PAST EVENTS,  Performing Arts

    HEAD OVER HEELS @ SWIFTS CREEK

    Circus Week with Year 8s at Swifts Creek P12 School 2017 Monday: Joined by Luth Wolff from Solid State Circus, we begin with an introduction to all the skills we are going to be learning and cocreating with during the week. They are picking skills up pretty fast, and are surprisingly aware of their bodies for their age group. After warm up games and chatting about the storyline we will weave, we delve into tumbling, acrobalance, sliding table, hoops, staff, poi and movement. Excitement – 95%, Skill – 15% Tuesday: Today we begin creating patterns for each of the skills, so everyone has a basic choreography to come back to.…

  • CREATIVITY,  EDUCATION,  Entertainment,  Performing Arts

    ACTING UP @ SWIFTS CREEK

    Performing Arts Intensive Earlier this year we were blessed to be back at Swifts Creek P12 School, this time with a performing arts intensive for the Year 6s and 7s. In collaboration with the contageously joyous Chris James from The Dreaming Space and talented actor and teacher David Clisby, the students were immersed in a swell of creative classes. Chris and David spent more time on the physical aspects included acting, clowning, improvisation and singing, offering loads of technical skill interspersed with time for creative development and presentation. I offered creative movement, puppetry, and the creative production aspects such as script and story writing, facepainting, music in theatre and costume…

  • CREATIVITY,  Entertainment,  Performing Arts

    SCARY CLOWNS TAKE TO THE STAGE

    I love co-creating with students, beginning with a seed of an idea, helping it to grow, nourish it with skillls and tools, and feed it until it unfurls like a lilly… well maybe not a lilly, more like a scaful of scary clowns; well that’s the theme that was requested so that’s what we did!! At one of our earlier bootcamps at Swifts Creek P12 School in November last year. Year 8s are fun. They have enough motor skills to do all the awesome technical things we teach, and enough playfulness to explore and create, and enough mind to bring their own ideas to the table. I was glad to…

  • EDUCATION,  VIDEOS

    HOW CHILDREN CAN TEACH THEMSELVES

    As a disillusioned student in the 1980s I was desperate to get out of school. I stuck it out to the end but it was stifling and agonisingly boring and irrelevant for the most part. We just all seemed to be at war and no one wanted to be in those sterile classrooms memorising facts and figures without context or reason. But come the weekends I would write, play, cook, garden, draw, create all sorts of things, and I think that’s where most of my learning came from. Children are so able to learn and figure out how to do things, that is how we were all made! To copy…