Wednesday 21 November 2018

Creative house design

This week we looked at house designs and drawing a floor plan. We tried to draw floor plans of our houses.
We did a survey on the number of bedrooms in people's houses and found that the majority of people in our classes have 3 or 4 bedroom houses.

Image result for kyosho jutaku
A micro house in Tokyo
We thought about differences in houses, and reasons for differences. We looked at houses in Japan - especially Tokyo where there are so many people (more than twice the population of NZ!!). In Japan there are 'kyosho jutaku' - or micro houses -utilising small areas for living spaces. Architects need to be very clever with the design of these micro houses, to fit everything in and to give the illusion of more space.
This video of a micro house just 24m2 is fascinating - very clever use of space.

We looked at reasons for building micro houses / tiny houses, and the kids discussed their ideas of what would be good about living in a micro house, and what could be not so good.

This 9 year old is inspirational - she's building tiny houses for homeless people!

Many kids then went on to design their dream bedroom - so many creative ideas! 

Tuesday 13 November 2018

CREATIVITY CONTINUED

Over the last few weeks at Quest we have been looking at creativity through a variety of lenses. We look at advertising and examples of creativity used to grab our attention or to persuade us to buy a product. We thought about strategies used by advertisers - humour, shock, persuasiveness, luxury, colours, sounds, storylines etc.
In groups, students were given a random everyday object and they had to come up with a creative way to advertise it.

Last week we looked at the creativity of Leonardo Da Vinci and the Renaissance period. We noted how Leonardo was very observant - his Vitruvian man sketch shows his findings that a person's arm span is usually equal (or very close to) their height. We measured this for ourselves and many children were surprised to find that he was right! We also noted that Leonardo was very creative - designing new ideas and inventing machines that were far ahead of his time.


This week we have been looking at creative thinking - the different types of thinking that encourage creativity. We completed tasks to try out the different thinking. Try this one for 'fluency' (many ideas) - how many things can you list that keep something or someone out? eg - an umbrella keeps the rain out, eyelids keep the light out.
We looked at a very creative artist - Victor Nune - who uses everyday objects as inspiration for his drawings. Google his work - it's fascinating! Children drew their own pictures incorporating an object I gave them - we had our own 'art gallery tour' to see each other's ideas.

Here are a few of the year 1-4 students' Victor Nune type sketches. This was looking at imagination.














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