Site Content ©2015 Matt Jolly, Gee King, Josh Fewtrell, Jemma Aldridge all rights reserved. Photographs ©2015 Paul Jolly all rights reserved.
Getting opinions
The first thing that we tried was to post on various forums, asking for people’s opinions of a couple of activities at a time. However, we found that most of the forum posts were not very useful and only provided limited feedback. For example one member said to stick to making necklaces and bracelets, but did not give any reason why. Other people gave suggestions for activities that were not really suitable for the book such as geoboards, which require elastic bands to work instead of string.
After being disappointed with the forums we realised that the best feedback would come from children trying out the activities themselves. We emailed a few schools in the Bognor area asking to set up a lunchtime club to test our ideas. Only one school replied, but they were very accommodating and helpful. We managed to arrange one lunchtime session each week for three weeks. Week one offered printing and bracelet making, week two offered Dream Catcher making and circle drawing, and week three was full of skipping activities.
As part of our project we decided that it would be good to get people’s opinions of our activities. We thought that if we gathered some constructive feedback we would be able to adapt our ideas to make them more accessible and enjoyable to everyone. We also thought that it would help to better justify why we had chosen certain activities to put in our book over others.
The feedback we got from the children was really useful and allowed us to adapt some of our activities. The best example of useful feedback we received was for the circle drawing activity. During the session, the children found it very difficult to draw the circles with string and blu tack meaning that they were very wobbly and not at all circular. They instead just drew their own pictures using the pens and paper provided. When we asked the children what they found difficult they said that the paper did not stay in place and the blu tack did not hold the string very well. Therefore, in our book, we removed this activity.
We found the lunchtime club really enjoyable. Not only was it nice to actually see our ideas be used by children, we got some valuable feedback that helped improve and shape the activities in our book.
Creativity 3
A re-
