SKiPPS Chicken Coop 

Dear SKiPPS community,

My name is Dugald Jellie and I like to make things – creative things - using mostly recycled materials, and usually working with others, especially children, on collaborative projects.

Your school has asked me to help build a chicken house, and I have no doubt it will be the best chicken house we can build! These chooks, they don’t know how lucky they’ll be.

But I need your help. 

Mostly, I need a bunch of willing workers! A group of children keen to get their hands dirty, learning how to make things - using a handsaw and a hammer, a tape measure and a spirit level – and thinking about design, and sustainability, and all the world around us. 

Helping parents would also be useful! I’ll let you know, but please feel free to come and join us once we get started. Usually, we’ll be working on Friday mornings, between recess until lunch. No building skills required! Come and learn how to work with wood – just as I believe every child should learn how to use a handsaw (using the body to move the mind), every adult ought to experience the pleasure of chiselling along the grain at least once in their life! 

And together, we’ll make something the whole school can be proud of. 

Oh, yes, I’m also after a few young budding filmmakers! I’d like them to work alongside us, and document what we do, and I think we should make a film about it, about our ‘chook house project’ – to show others schools and communities what we can do. And why not enter it in a children’s film festival?

More details to come, shortly. 

In the meantime, if you’re interested in the sorts of projects I do at other schools and kindergartens, and the philosophies I abide by, please have a look at my work website: www.bowerbirdgardens.com.

And I live nearby, in Windsor, and will be bringing tools to your school in a bicycle trailer, because that’s the fun way to do it!

We’ll get started this Friday, with our hearts and our minds, our heads and our hands.

Looking forward to it all,

Dugald

0425 005 531