Year Group:
Aim of Work:
What did we do?
Telling The Bees was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and gave us the opportunity to be part of an incredible project working in Sheffield schools alongside professionals from the world of digital and interactive design and archaeology.
The project combined elements of a Mantle of the Expert dramatic-inquiry approach with design thinking and design fiction, to explore the world of the honey bee. We worked with the schools and children during half a term, leading them through a set of activities (including drama, design, creative writing, and 3D prototyping) to enable the children to discover and understand the threats facing bees, beekeeping, pollination, and the global environmental ramifications of a world without bees.
What impact did the project have?
We worked with 4 classes of Y5 pupils in two inner city primary schools, supporting the children to boost their independent learning and team working. The children were asked to form imaginary design companies that were being consulted on ways to address catastrophic declines in the honey bee population in a near future where bees were either a) extinct, or b) extremely rare. Each group was asked to produce an imaginative product design that would provide a solution to alleviate one of the consequences of the lack of bees. They came up with some truly amazing ideas!
In addition, to develop children’s writing skills and expand the fictional world inhabited by their prototypes, each group worked together to create their own newspaper that included photographs of their drama pieces, written reports of their ideas, creative writing in the form of poetry and jokes, and illustrations of their design (e.g. as an advert). These were collated, transcribed and printed up into a complete set of newspapers for each class.
Bee observation
