Should your creature be fierce or friendly?
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Encouraging creativity
Creativity always involves taking risks. Design ideas that are risk free are unlikely to be innovative. At a recent in service session teachers were tackling this unit. One teacher decided to use circular discs instead of squares for the basic building block. She used finely corrugated green card and cut a radial slit in each disc. Then she carefully stapled each one so that it formed a shallow cone. Then she used short pieces of the corrugated card to join the cones together to form a shell shape to act as the body of her Skilly. It was a simple matter to add kind eyes and a smiling mouth to the shell so she had the basis of a friendly creature. Then she thought about the legs and decided on two very long legs with shallow cones at the bottom to act as feet. So her creature was a combination of a crab and a giraffe! This teacher admitted to 'always wanting to do something different'.
You may have children in your class who are like this. Sometimes their creative ambition outstrips their making abilities. It is important to allow such children to experiment and support their ideas by helping them with any making difficulties. The difficulty here is that this support can be very time consuming. One solution to this is to give your classroom assistant the brief of supporting particularly creative children. Another possibility is to have an after school design & technology club where such children can develop the making skills to support their risk taking.
What would a giraffe-crab combination skilly look like?