Analyse, Innovate, Improve
In DT, pupils at Heronsgate have been given the opportunity to develop a wide range of skills and enable them to explore their creativity through planning, designing, creating and evaluating their work to consider the user, function and purpose. Pupils also have a strong sense of achievement and pride in their innovative final product. Throughout early years, key stage one and key stage two pupils are encouraged to be innovative and creative when designing and are able to make purposeful products that are functional.
Construction and Ingenuity - Nursery
In Nursery children have been demonstrating wonderful creativity, resilience and originality in their thinking as well as developing their fine motor skills. In this picture the children spontaneously create structures out of the resources laid out. The children often make a structure and when it doesn’t do what they intend (e.g. fall over rather than stand up) they redesign it and explore if the new design works better. Sometimes the children use unexpected items to build with such as upside down buckets or leaves. Pupils are often very proud of their creations and keen to share with adults.
Bringing Life to Stories - Year 1
This half term Year One have been learning about simple sliding lever mechanisms in order to create their own moving picture book to read to a friend. In order for the design to be functional and purposeful children have been learning about how to make a moving part using a lever. This has included how to use the necessary tools including scissors, hole punch and a split pin safely. in the next lesson children will use the skills they have developed to carefully consider a design that is purposeful, innovative and most importantly functional for their user.
“Kneading” to Improve - Year 3
Pupils in Year Three have been designing and creating a bread roll as part of the America topic. During the designing process pupils carefully considered their design decisions in order for the bread roll to appeal to their user and explore their creativity so that it was innovative and stood out amongst other bread products that pupils investigated in a previous lesson.
No baggage left behind! - Year 6
As part of Year Six’s Textiles project pupils made a bag suitable for a World War II evacuees to carry their personal belongings in. During the design process pupils carefully considered the function of the bag in order to hold potentially heavy items. During the design process they also considered the aesthetics so that it would appeal to a child of that time. Pupils were able to design a bag that needed to be inventive as well as building upon their prior knowledge of textiles from Year Two.
