CLASS 3 at Egloskerry Primary School recently immersed themselves into the Greenpower Goblin project in 2016, completing an AQA Greenpower award alongside the building and making of the goblins, writes class teacher, Miss Rachael Torr.

The weeks leading up to the project were met with excitement and enthusiasm from all children who were keen to get stuck into the building and new learning. The AQA award provided the children with a platform to learn the key skills of science and engineering behind the practical side of making the goblins.

The children were involved in evidencing team work, health and safety, how circuits work, looking at a CAD system for the design side and much more.

Additionally, the children could see a connection between the fun, practical side of building and the written work behind it, and therefore were motivated to learn. They took ownership over how they wanted to present their work and worked together to support each other on areas they felt more confident in.

The award also encouraged those children, who were happy to take a step back in the practical element, to become more involved as they knew they had to evidence each objective to gain the award.

From a teacher perspective, the AQA award materials provided a clean outcome, based on an approach to planning a sequence of learning.

At Egloskerry every pupil was given a Goblin AQA workbook that they had completed autonomy over. The pupils were expected to self-evaluate and complete peer-to-peer learning and assessments, allowing themselves to achieve the best outcomes set by AQA.

Interestingly, this resulted in some very high quality outcomes for pupils who regularly struggle to access ‘normal’ lessons and book work. This approach also freed up the teacher to focus on the practical element of the build with small groups.

Over the entirety of the project, all children developed and learnt many invaluable, transferable skills that they can now apply to a multitude of situations in the future; gaining breadth and depth of application.

Impressively, all children passed the three aspects of the award and had that huge sense of achievement at the end.