CHILDREN, SPACES, RELATIONSHIPS

By: Samantha Wilson

Our school environment must lend itself to manipulation and transformation by adults and children alike. Together as a community, we initiated a conversation to discuss how to incorporate our newly installed WOODEN LOFT into our learning space, to give it a precise identity that suited our needs.  

As always, our aim was to offer further learning opportunities for all of our students, whilst including them in the design process.  We discussed at length the choices we could make, in terms of spatial distribution, acknowledging that layout would have to be an important consideration.

We are aware that creating a new workspace supports the formation and continued development of the relationships of the people that inhabit the space.We wanted to design a workplace that fosters social relations, the development of lovely human encounters,  and for it to be supportive of the joys of our daily interactions with each other.

The children all agreed that our new learning space should be used for research, experimentation, and manipulation of a variety of materials.

Together we talked about our Loft being organized with care, to ensure further consultation opportunities for all of our community members and of course, to support future investigations and inquiries.  

We always aim to promote an easy and unhurried exchange of ideas.  Part of our planning time included looking at our current workspaces and deciding if any of them would be well-suited additions to our new Loft.  
We captured the children’s ideas as they sketched their individual designs and then together decided on the initial set-up for the top and lower levels.  The children were unanimous in their decision that our Loft should be a beautiful space for everyone to enjoy together.  
     
Our first plan includes making the upstairs into a kitchen (like a real house) and the downstairs area is to become our dark space for experimentation with the scientific phenomenon of light.