ISLANDS and OCEANS - beginning

Imagine an island...

COMPETENCE & COMPASSION in the ATELIER There is something about islands that sparks the imagination. When Adam (age 4) calls his series of small LEGO builds ‘my islands’ a beautiful new idea is born in the Atelier. Quickly adopted by other children, the first islands become a growing archipelago, formed by LEGO pieces, daydreams, experiments, designs. Each island tells us something about its maker’s hands and mind, some have names and the beginnings of stories, all underline a deep human desire - to inhabit imagined as well as actual worlds.

Everybody has a secret world inside of them. I mean everybody. All of the people in the whole world…no matter how dull and boring they are on the outside. Inside them they’ve all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds...Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe. ― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 5: A Game of You

I made Impossible Island!...you need to dodge the laser and get this diamond. And there’s spiders. If you come to Impossible Island you have armour so you can dodge those obstacles - the laser, the spiders, the ice cream. Yi Yi (age 5)

After several weeks of making we begin to see commonalities in the Islands, alongside distinctive differences. There are islands that offer challenges, islands that have jobs, luxurious islands, tricky islands, floating islands, flying islands.

Some children seem to create with an internal sense of design, voicing out loud what they are building. Others respond gradually through a collaborative conversation between their ideas and the LEGO pieces. The children’s competence has many aspects: they are making abstract ideas tangible, turning vision into reality, expressing agency in complex decision-making, and creativity in its deepest sense - bringing something into being that did not exist before. The islands take satisfying form in the children’s hands but just as significant are the many trials, estimates, remixes, tests they make in the process.

Water Island. It has plants you can smell and these are the most amazing plants - they grow fruit you can eat, they taste like candy. The water comes out of this part, a fountain. And it even has a chair. Water Island is the amazingest thing in the world. Hayden (age 5)

By creating islands that combine imagination and direct experience the children make places that are meaningful to themselves and resonant for others. Sometimes we visit the collection of islands on the large wooden table like travellers; asking questions, finding familiar structures, working out landmarks. By welcoming each other’s placemaking we express compassion for our shared need to belong, We find ways to feel at home in actual and fantastical locations - a competence that is important for people who move around the world, crossing cultures and languages frequently. The children love their isands for good reason and are deeply absorbed in the work of shaping them.

But we will not break the islands. We will never break them. Arman (age 6)

The Big Island where I go. Mishea (age 4) Diamond-Bug Island. You can take only 1 diamond.

I mean 10 diamonds. And I put a carrot here. If you don’t follow the rules and you don’t take only 10 diamonds, you have this carrot. Yi Yi (age 5)

Rabbit-Spinner Island.

Aeroplane-Bunny-Spinner-Island.

T-shirt-Cleaner Island. Adam (age 4) A Colour for an Island. Matouš (age 4) This is the House

Island with an antenna on the house. This is the Relaxing Island, the yellow one.

This is a Boat - for the water and the sky. Arman (age 5) A Spinning Star Island. It’s actually beautiful.

Max (age 5)

I’m making an Island

Sea, I’m making the Ocean.

Ulysses (age 3)

A Washing Island - it washes all the other islands on the sea. Also the sea!! Arman (age 5)

This one has this thing, the net, and the fish go in and he throw it to the

Island. For people. Seby (age 4)

This is my Island - When they want to climb up then they jump up to this flower and here they will relax and there they will go and play, the kids - on the green part, in everything. And by this pink place, they can swim.

Sofie (age 5)

I share video research with the children about the world’s most unusual islands, whose names sound like they could easily have been invented in the Atelier. This wider context research is an important part of our learning and leads curiosity into new areas: If these strange islands exist what else is possible? What else can we imagine, create, discover?

Aoshima / Cat Island (Japan): An old fishery island where cats now outnumber people 10:1 Warawara / Vanishing Island (Philippines): An island that comes and goes with the tides Ilha da Queimada Grande / Snake Island (Brazil): The only natural home of the endangered, venomous golden lancehead pit viper. No visitors are allowed to land. Ōkunoshima / Rabbit Island (Japan): More than 1000 rabbits live wild on this island which is now a tourist area and wildlife park after its dark history in WWII. Sable Island (Nova Scotia): Known as ‘the graveyard of the Atlantic’ an island of 490 shipwrecks and 450 wild horses.

Vulcan Point (Philippines): An island in a lake, on an island, inside a larger lake, inside an outer island in the Pacific Ocean.

COMPETENCE, COMPASSION...CURRICULUM From Adam’s first islands a whole project is growing. By using our compassion and competence as teachers to listen deeply to children, we can design new research pathways from their deepest fascinations. In fact, it turns out that imagining islands, creating models, images and mythologies of islands is a widely shared human fascination, and accompanies our desire to understand these places and the oceans around them scientifically. We can take a transdisciplinary approach to our learning in which ecology, geology, oceanography, narrative, graphic design and expressive arts all play a part.

MATERIALS

/ LEGO / plasticine, clay / water, foam, ink / snow, ice / markers, paper / research imagery, videos

LANGUAGES OF EXPRESSION: design, engineering, geometry, narrative, material science, aesthetic arts, sculpture, diagram drawing, recording, design

ISLANDS & OCEANS

/ underwater worlds / the Midnight Zone / oceans, water, movement / mystery, power, knowledge

ISLAND STORIES

ISLAND FORMATION

/ volcanos, rock forms, land forms / animals, plants, minerals / time, change, transformation

/ mythologies / human culture / storymaking, the unknown / fantasy, imagination, possibility