Creativity and Play: It’s Not Just for Children

As you know, we really enjoy it when teachers and learners come up with their own games and ideas – with rules, scoring systems and strategies. These games are shared with the Tagtiv8 community around the world. To find out more about statements such as “Miss, they’re playing our game in Australia!” visit the blog post, https://tagtiv8.com/creativity-sharing-your-games-worldwide/ Last month we were really fortunate to be invited to deliver a workshop on Active Learning at the Practical Pedagogies conference in France. Before the conference began, we successfully trialled new games with the children and teachers in Years 2 and 5 from the International School of Toulouse. At the conference itself, we learned so much from keynote, Ewan McIntosh, as well as others both leading and attending workshops. We are still synthesising the various provocations, ideas and inputs. For an insight into the event, visit:

• http://www.technologytoteach.co.uk/practical-pedagogies-2015
• https://brynllewellyn.wordpress.com/2015/11/06/the-difference-made-by-a-single-letter/

Since the event, there has been almost as much activity online as there was during our workshop entitled, ‘Getting Off our Backsides: Making Learning Active, Relevant and Fun’. We were intrigued by the tweets sent from Bradford Grammar School: Likewise, we loved the images and ideas from Laura Riley from St George's School in Cologne: “I used your Tagtiv8 idea today to help teach German word order. Thanks for the idea. Now to tweak it before I try again!”

“In the session, we had numbers which were on belts that you could pull off each other when playing tag. After we played this, we then categorised the numbers. I couldn't do this outside so I used the creative space at our school instead. I stuck different word groups around the room and gave the pupils 30 seconds to find as many verbs as possible. They then had to categorise them (different tenses, conjugations etc). They then had to find the personal pronouns and match them to the verbs. I then added time phrases, connectives, opinion phrases etc and as we went along, grammar points were explained. By the end, pupils could make full sentences using correct word order and could explain it.” We are so pleased to see teachers taking our initial ideas and trying them out with their learners, tweaking them and ‘making them their own’. We are anticipating to see how conference organiser, Russel Tarr, develops the ideas further with his awesome resource, http://www.activehistory.co.uk/ We are now pleased to say, “They’re playing our games in Germany and elsewhere in Europe!” A bientot