Creative Schools | Three Ways School

Welcome to Three Ways Creative Schools. Within this section of the website you will have the opportunity to explore some of the fantastic creative projects and partnerships that take place between Three Ways and our wider community. These range from small scale class based projects to collaborations with artists and professional practitioners, theaters, orchestras, universities and research centres. Each project covers an area of creative arts including visual art, music, dance and drama or a combination of these disciplines.

Drama collaboration with the Egg Theatre

A three year Drama collaboration with the Egg Theatre in Bath, including performances of Romeo and Juliet, class based creative interventions and approaches, a primary ‘This is me’ project and a week long residency with Bamboozle Theatre Company.

Acoustic Landscape Gardening

This exciting project sees our children using their voices of expression through music, design and the tangible production of an acoustic sculpture in our outdoor play area. Starting the process is our in-house Music Therapist and established professional musician Adrian Snell, taking the children on a journey exploring different sound sources and musical textures. Visiting other school’s sensory outdoor musical instruments, the children have the opportunity to gain an appreciation of the direction of the project. The pupils’ ideas will lie at the core of the design phase as they work to develop a brief alongside Joe Cooper and Dr Martin Mawdsley of Touchwood Enterprises. The final installation will provide students with an interactive play and therapeutic space where sound can be explored and enjoyed by all.

Scent Project

As part of this project, pupils will investigate how scent can be captured and recreated to help with the recounting or construction of stories. Pupils will be engaged in the use of scent to represent emotion and mood in their stories along with literal representations. Pupils will be encouraged to develop their own interpretation of which scents should be used to bring their stories to life. Following in the footsteps of famous Scent artist Sissel Tolas students will explore the notion of a geography of scent within their locality and around Bath. PHD student and interactive performance artist Keir Williams will explore work with students to bring their stories to life in the sensory theatre, whilst London based scent artist Lizzie Ostrom will lead pupils through a magical journey of scent exploration. Three Ways’ own interactive content designer Luke Woodbury will lead the technical elements of scent distribution in what is considered to be genuine cutting edge research.

Storysharing

We all like to tell our friends what we have been doing – having a chat, sharing our news and stories!

Storysharing is about communication – it’s an innovative way of supporting students with complex needs to share their own stories with one other. These stories are the little, everyday, funny and unusual things we see and do – sharing them builds friendships, confidence, and self-esteem.

Storysharing is fun. We use multi sensory approaches, signing, communication aids, objects of reference, art, sound, music and technology in addition to the spoken word. Students learn to remember their stories, practice telling them and make records (‘story archives’). Together we do ‘active listening’ – as much joining in as possible.

Sharing these stories is a powerful tool too. Students use their stories to celebrate successes; to think about choices; in annual reviews; in assemblies; and for decision-making, such as in school council meetings.

Storysharing is a three-year project run by Openstorytellers, a charity founded by communications expert Dr. Nicola Grove. The project leader is Jane Harwood. Funded by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation and the Rayne Foundation, the project also explores new technologies, trying out new ways of recording and sharing stories.

How to get involved.

Storysharing works really well when families are involved – we’re happy to come and visit you. If you would like to know more, please get in touch through the school office.

http://www.openstorytellers.org.uk/pages/storysharinginschools.html

Creative Enterprise

This project focuses on those pupils who are toward the end of their education with the aim to establish tangible skills advantageous in the adult working world and provide a viable option for launching their own livelihood. Two successful craft and fine art professionals, running their own enterprises, are being brought in to provide an intensive series of workshops to pass on their specific skills and experience to pupils.

Term 2 sees our year 11 pupils working with Kim Thompson, a highly successful local jewellery designer, who is providing grounding in key aspects of jewellery production using polymer and silver clay. Term 3 will be learning to create desirable wire based sculpture and decorative products with expert Mel Day. Pupils will gain an understanding of the design process, product development and commercial standards of presentation. There will be opportunities to test their produce and hone their marketing skills in the ‘real world’ with participation in Christmas markets and future craft events.

‘Sensortive’ Learning Approaches

Everybody possesses a creative energy and a huge part of the work that all teachers carry out is to recognise and facilitate its growth. At Three Ways, we are always looking for emergent technology that empowers and inspires our pupils and brings their creative energy into form. We have been involved with Professor Lizbeth Goodman and Professor Mick Donegan and the Smart Lab team from UEL to explore the teaching learning and creative potential of eye gaze technology. This technology has provided pupils with profound and multiple learning difficulties with a means to communicate and interact with the world around them. Here we investigated the potential of using eye gaze and sensor-based technology to produce robotic responses to play instruments enabled these pupils to interact in a ‘physical’ way with peers and their environment. Musician and technological guru Dave Meckin built a robotic glockenspiel for our students to use either via a touch sensitive screen or sensor activated pads. This project provided all sorts of learners with the potential to animate their learning, inspired interaction and encouraged speaking and listening opportunities.

Digital Story Telling

In this enchanting project pupils were empowered to use their own voice by engaging with professional storyteller Michael Loader and an interactive performance artist Keir Williams to construct their own unique stories. A Primary and Secondary group ventured to an array of inspiring off site locations to generate narratives based on the stimuli they encountered on their learning journeys.

Pupils gathered multi-sensory support resources including digital sound and visual recordings of natural and man made objects to enhance the retelling of their tales in our state of the art Sensory Theatre. We were happy to be able to extend this scheme to local schools that in turn generated their own stories for performance. The work culminated in an evening of story telling performances run by the students for their parents.

Camouflaged Project

Many young people and adults with special needs feel they find themselves overlooked at the margins of today’s society.

Yasmeen Al Awadi, an artist whose work covers marginalised groups who are often ‘socially invisible’, worked with the pupils to document a project that explored these themes. Using drama, improvisation and the help of costume designer Tara Mooney, pupils created their own means of camouflage. With the support of local artist Ben Thompson, they were photographed using the latest Gigapan technology to produce interactive images in three settings (school, Bath city centre and a local woodland) with the ‘invisible’ pupils hidden in the images. Pupils’ views and wellbeing were explored throughout the project and logged in a video documentary created using pupil’s own interviews and footage. All the material produced will form part of a future exhibition piece.

School Orchestra

Three Ways school have a wonderful group of pupils who make music together in our weekly orchestra sessions, called ‘Open Orchestra’. Miss Warburton (music teacher) and Mike Moast (freelance music facilitator) support our young people to be creative, expressive and above all, independent. All our pupils play an important role in contributing to our musical creations using a range of percussion instruments, bass guitars, piano and an app called ‘Clarion’ via an IPad or eye-gaze device.

Our young musicians have the opportunity to learn vital musical skills such as listening, exploring, working in a group, taking turns, rehearsing and adjusting their dynamics and tempo.

Our fully inclusive orchestra has had such a positive impact on boosting confidence, self-esteem and the ability to ‘have a go’. Each week our pupils arrive so happy and engaged, ready to immerse themselves to create fantastic rhythms, riffs and melodies together.

We have all enjoyed performing to our school community and are always keen to show off the pupils talents! It has been a real pleasure supporting these sessions each week and working with such amazing, talented young people.