The Peppercorns 10s & 11s
Term Two has been a thrilling time in which the Peppercorn children have taken a deep dive into science and creativity. Our Central Idea for our Unit of Inquiry is ‘Creativity can be expressed through light and sound’. This has sparked intrigue around the use of light and sound and how best to manipulate it for creative purposes.
The children have been visiting Blackhall for science lessons with a familiar face, Victor Toufas! Vic has been facilitating investigations into the nature of light, exploring reflection and refraction using the Hodson Light Box. The children have placed mirrors and prisms to manipulate the light and measure the reflecting and refracting angles that are produced. Back at Arlington, the investigations have manifested in many different ways. For light, the children produced sun prints and shadow puppets as an expression of art. For sound, the children have conducted experiments such as ‘making a button sing’ in which they made a button vibrate to produce a humming noise. This developed into the art of sound manipulation for the film, ‘Sound Foley’. The children matched their own sounds produced by whichever means to a 30 second clip.
The Unit of Inquiry has leant itself perfectly for transdisciplinary learning as we explore light's relationship to angles. As previously mentioned, the children have measured the angles of reflection and refraction and have been supplemented with the necessary skills and language around this in our maths sessions. The Peppercorns classroom is rarely seen without protractors on the table, or visual representations of angles on the walls! We eagerly await the Personal Projects the children have been working on for the past few weeks.
They have been working either individually or in small groups to produce their own creative representation of sound and light. Puppet shows, photography exhibitions, shadow drawings and stop-motion films are just some of the things that await our return to the classroom!
Rosie Grimm & Oliver Breedon
10s & 11s Classroom Teachers