Pollination Project and Arts Award
For the last ten weeks I have been involved in a project with Bournville Junior school where the year 5 children are working towards the Explore level of Trinity College Arts Award. The whole year group has been involved and we have had a successful term of composing and making music based on the Pollination Project theme.
In planning the music part of the course, we wanted to give the children opportunities to compose using tuned and un-tuned percussion, to write simple graphic scores of these compositions, and to explore what it meant to be a composer. We also worked together on the lyrics for a song, ‘Busy Buzzing Bumble Bees’ and came up with three new verses which we recorded.
The creativity and originality shown by the pupils really amazed me. We gave them some simple parameters for the composition work: 1. using a drone that linked with a main beat or pulse; 2. having some kind of sound that represented the buzzing bees, and 3. using melody to represent different flowers the bees flew to.
The children worked in groups of 5 or 6 and had a couple of sessions to work out their pieces. The room seemed to be chaotic — a melée of noise and movement. An on-looker would have thought it impossible to come up with anything. But, every week, after fifteen minutes of seeming madness, we would stop and ask the groups to show what they had worked out. Time and time again we heard some sensitive, thoughtful and well-organised performances that used the parameters in a creative way. We had opportunity to suggest ways of improving aspects, and these improvements were made almost instantly. One group had quite a high number of instrumentalists, many of whom were absolute beginners. And yet it was wonderful to see the confidence with which their 2 or 3 notes were played and how they incorporated them into the overall structure with precision and decisiveness.
The main objective of the Arts Award is “for children to take part in different arts activities and record what inspires them, to experience the work of artists and arts organisations, to create art work and to present their exploration to others.”
All the work that we did, and that is still being done in other ways at Bournville, is logged by making recordings, using the scores, taking videos, writing critiques of their work and reflecting on what inspired them. These are put together in a log book. It is a colourful record of their experiences of the different art forms experienced in the project.
Overall, I have been really impressed by the pupils’ engagement with the project, and am really pleased that I have been part of something so clearly intended to inspire young people to enjoy music and the arts. The Arts Award is a brilliant framework around which children can combine many different arts in a creative but structured way. I see it giving the children a sense of achievement and purpose in their learning, and also a motivation to try new things and have new experiences.
Well done, Bournville Juniors! I look forward to seeing you with your awards later in the year.