Bryn Celynnog - Year 7 Focus Group

Every Tuesday morning I was given my very own year 7 group where I could run any project I wanted to with them, this was my focus group. One reason why I was given this group was because alongside it we had to write an assignment, I knew I wanted to base mine on how learners behave when taking part in group work activities. This helped as a starting point for creating a project around this.

I wanted to create a project where all sides of the curriculum would be fed in. I came up with this idea of learners creating a giant recyclable city. In groups they would build their own towns that would then link up at the end of the project. Learners had to think about what was going in their towns very critically. They were given the brief of building this town for all the homeless people of the UK to live in. Therefore, they could not just build what they liked in these towns, they needed to think of what these homeless people would really need in order to survive. The class was broken up into five groups of four learners, each groups town had a specific function. There was residential, parks, tourism, art facilities, and community services. Having these functions helped narrow down what the learners could make and made them think more about what they were placing in their towns.

Each learner in each group then had their own role, there was; the town Mayer, designer, spokesperson, and scribe. Each role would contribute differently to the group each week.

The first part of the project was the designing. Learners would all have to design the buildings going in their towns and create a blue print to help them with the layout at a later stage.

The design process lasted three weeks, learners would create a series of designs before they would then go on to begin collecting all their recycable materials and begin making their towns.

 

It was really important that each group worked as a team each week to create their towns! Learners had three weeks to actually build their towns. Once they were built learners were given an A3 piece of mount board, this is where they would stick their towns to, this made learners think about the layout of their towns and made sure they did not go to big or too small with the town size, it acted as a bit of a constraint.

 

 

In the following weeks learners then had to add all of the decoration to their towns so they looked a lot more visually pleasing, and so people would actually want to live there!

 

I was very happy with the final outcome of this project, all of the towns were joined up and really suited each other in styles as the final big city. Learners fed back to me they enjoyed making their towns and were all very happy with the outcome.

Here are a few photo's of the final city before I took the images and turned it into a final Photoshop city poster.

I tried out a few different scenario's.

 

Here is a display I put up outside the Art rooms to showcase this project I had been doing with the year 7 group.

 

I really enjoyed having leadership over this group for 12 weeks, the project turned out really well. One thing I learnt is that learners do like working in groups but sometimes they found that some personalities would take over in the group. In the future I would make the groups a bit more evenly balanced, personality and ability wise.