This week in Class Five, we spent some time thinking about something that might seem very simple… circles.
But we quickly discovered that circles can be pretty powerful.
A circle has no beginning and no end. It is strong, connected and continuous. And, of course, circles are a big part of life in our crew. Every day, we circle up together — to listen, share, celebrate, solve problems and make decisions. There is something special about sitting in a circle because everyone is part of it. There is no “front” or “back” and nobody is left out.
Our guiding question this week has been:
Does crew stop at the school gate?
Today, we started to explore that question by thinking about all the different crews we belong to outside of school.
The children came up with an amazing range of crews — football teams, families, gymnastics clubs, church groups, dance groups, friendship groups and much more. We organised ourselves into our different crews and then started to notice something really interesting…
Our crews overlap!
We might belong to different football teams, different families or different clubs, but we often had people in common. We discovered that although we are all wonderfully different, we actually have lots in common with one another.
This led us to think about how we behave in our different crews. Do we act differently depending on which crew we are in? Or do the things that make us us follow us wherever we go?
We thought about our character traits and realised that being kind, respectful, courageous, honest or compassionate doesn’t just belong in the classroom. These are qualities we carry with us into all of our crews.
So perhaps crew really doesn’t stop at the school gate…
In the afternoon, we took our circle thinking into our art.
We looked at the work of Wassily Kandinsky and noticed that he used circles again and again in his artwork. We explored his use of colour, shape and pattern before setting off to create our own Kandinsky-inspired pieces.
This time, we created trees made from circles, bringing together our ideas about connection, growth and belonging with our love of circles. ⭕🌳
It was lovely to see the children begin the day thinking about a simple shape and finish it thinking about something much bigger:
Who are my crews? Where do I belong? What do I bring to each crew? And how are we all connected?
Perhaps our circles aren’t just something we sit in after all… ❤️
