Information Collecting Deadline.

We must stop collecting our information on the first day of our new school year. After this day we will be making our changes and we want to see if our changes cause positive effects to happen. We will need time to look at our information and work out what it tells us, what the information shows us about how people feel about poetry and writing before we start our changes.

Reader Polls!

We have added easy to use "Reader Polls" to our Blog. They are on the right hand side of the page. We will be putting up lots of these so add your vote and watch out for more!

Our Questionnaire.

These are the ten questions we created for our questionnaire. If you are reading this Blog you can leave your answers as a comment. Click on the comments link, show the post, read our questions and type in your answers. Thank you.

1. Will poetry help me with my writing skills?
2. Do you like poetry?
3.When you read poems, do you understand them?
4. Do you know any famous poets?
5. Do you like acting out poems?
6. Do you try writing your own poetry?
7. What do you think poetry is about:
a. Poetry is more than just talking, it is creative and imaginative.
b. It is all about rhymes and beats.
c. It is funny nonsense.
8. Do you like long or short poems?
9. Do you often listen to poems?
10. What is your favourite poem?
11. Do you think poems are special?

Collecting more information.

We have so far only got 25 comments in our online interview. It is also quite hard to look at the comments and use them to present some information. We need to collect some information in a way that we can use it to start looking for ideas to discuss, like, "How many people read poems?" or "Do children in our school understand what poems are?"
We have decided to make a Questionnaire, this will help us collect information quickly. It will also help us to look for things to talk about.

Getting more people commenting.

Here are our ideas to get more people commenting on our Blog:
1. Share the address with friends who have e-mail, people we e-mail already.
2. Share the Blog with our families.
3. Get the Blog into the school newsletter, asking people to look at it and post comments.
4. At play times share the Blog with a friend, showing them how to find it, use it and place a comment.
5. Share the Blog with family members in different countries.

Listening to our interviews.

To listen to the interviews click on the title above.

Or, view them on the right hand side of the Blog.

We recorded some interviews using Audacity. They tell us what our friends already know about poetry and what they already think. It is important to record this information before we start our,"Cause and effect" part of the research.

Collecting information: The Big Interview!

We now know that the more people we ask to answer our questions, the more important and accurate our research becomes.
We now want to see how many people we can interview before we start the project.
Please can you answer these questions by putting your answers into the comments box.

Could you leave your name and age.

The Big Online Interview Questions:

1. Why is poetry important?
2. Do you like poetry?
3. Do you know any famous Poets?
4. Do you think that listening to and performing poems will help our writing skills?

Collecting Information: Interviews.

We have found out that when you do research you must collect lots of different kinds of information. This is so you can use it to help answer your question and guide your discussion.
Our first task as researchers is to find out what different people already know about poetry.
We have decided to use interviews as a way of collecting information.
This information will be kept on this Blog, so when we have finished, we can compare what people knew and thought at the beginning and at the end of our project.

In the comments part of this post you will find our own individual questions, these will be used in our interviews.

Our Project Outline. What it will look Like!

In planning out the look of our project we agreed on this outline:

The project will involve all the year two children and supporting adults. It will also involve all teachers and learning support assistants.
We will plan the project in Autumn Term Two and start collecting our evidence in Spring Term One.

This Blog will be our published research. After we have collected and discussed our research we will work on publishing this Blog to as many people as possible and ask them to comment on our project.

We will test our ideas by trying out five different cause and effect projects:

We will get children and Adults in Year Two sharing more poems, by reading and perform them.

We will have a poetry writing and performing competition for all children.

We will challenge teachers to read three poems every week to their classes.

We will get all the teachers to write a poem and we will choose the poem we like the best. The teacher who wrote that poem will then teach the children in all the classes about how the thought about their poem and how they wrote it.

We will try and get a real poet to visit the school and work with us.

These ideas will take place in an enrichment lesson, every Thursday.
The ideas will last for half a term.

We will interview grown ups and children, asking them about poems at the start and at the end of the project.

We will collect information using questionnaires and surveys.
We will collect one poem from everyone at the start of the project and at the end of the project.

Dear Reader, please publish a comment so we can read what you think and discuss your ideas.

Rationale.

We have agreed on these four ideas as a rationale for our project:
Will adults listen to our research?
Will our research make learning more interesting?
Will it make us better writers?
Will it make us clever and smarter?
Please read our comments for more individual points of view.

What do we think we might find out?

Before we start this project we need to try and think about what might actually happen, here are some of our ideas and comments.

Our Project.

Will listening to poems and performing them improve my writing skills?

We are trying to find out if learning about poems will help our writing skills.

Foreword.

This project has been designed to positively challenge school policy makers and curriculum leaders. This projects allows children to investigate an area of learning that they view as valuable.
This project will discover if two things are possible:
1. Can children in Key stage One effectively research and understand their own learning journeys.
2. Will those adults making the most important decisions in schools, listen to and act on the implications draw out from child initiated and conducted research.

Fortunately for The Gearies Poetry Researchers, Gearies Infants School holds these such creative risks in high esteem, with the child central to its ethos. However, this might not be the case elsewhere. My interest in this project is to see if it really is possible for a child autonomous research project to take place in Key stage One.

If this is possible, where else could this journey take us?

Can we create a focus group of schools that develops child research projects, sharing as practitioners and facilitators the implications and impacts of the different projects, drawing together a generic system for initiating child lead research. In effect, challenging those that make the big decisions to listen to the small but very switched on voices of our children. This is a very exciting and powerful possibility. Hopefully, a very real one, soon to be discovered.

So, it is at this point that I now hand the Blog over to a group of 14 children, aged six, to conduct and publish their own project.

Dan Lea. AST: Creativity in Key stage One and The Early Years.