Coffs Harbour Public School Blog

Courtesy & Honour – Principal:Leonie Buehler

Nov
3

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Afghanistan Fighting Kites

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Wednesday’s ESL enrichment group have been working hard on their UNICEF school design project but over the last few weeks our group has received a number of new students with many from Afghanistan and its surrounding countries. Therefore, on Wednesday we decided to have a kite building session as Afghanistan is famous for its fighting kites. This sport was banned by the Taliban and many of our students have never flown let alone built a kite. It was a fantastic group activity (the kites flew extremely well until the wind dropped) and really helped to bond the group as laughter translates across all languages 🙂 Next week Hamid and some other students will be attempting a much larger kite that will be decorated like a real Afghanistan Fighting Kite. Other students are keen to continue with their virtual school project.


This is a video that illustrates this wonderful tradition.

Jul
31

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UNICEF School Design Project Week 3

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Article 28: (Right to education): All children have the right to a primary education, which should be free. Wealthy countries should help poorer countries achieve this right. Discipline in schools should respect children’s dignity. For children to benefit from education, schools must be run in an orderly way – without the use of violence. Any form of school discipline should take into account the child’s human dignity. Therefore, governments must ensure that school administrators review their discipline policies and eliminate any discipline practices involving physical or mental violence, abuse or neglect. The Convention places a high value on education. Young people should be encouraged to reach the highest level of education of which they are capable. UNICEF CRC

This week students transferred their rough draft plans of their school in Afghanistan to scale on large graph paper. This was hard initially as the students needed to develop the correct scale measurements on paper with 5mm grids. They soon grasped the concept and were working brilliantly transforming their drafts using  technical drawing skills to final two-dimensional representations ready for building. They started to use architectural graphic symbols as they added to their drawings. Placement of paths and widths of  windows, doors, walkways, needed to be calculated, all classrooms were 8m x 11m, and it was decided that the school student population not exceed 60 students with 15 students per classroom. Another consideration was how big the soccer fields would be and how to draw them to scale. Again, using great problem solving skills the relevant students solved the problem and proceeded to add playing fields to their plans.

UNICEF Australia has contacted the group and we will be organising a Skyping session with one of their new UNICEF Young Ambassadors. This will be a wonderful experience for our students as they get to speak first hand with an ambassador about the fantastic work UNICEF does to advocate for the rights of the child.

Mrs Booth, Mrs Newton & Yarob 🙂

Jul
24

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Afghanistan School Design Project

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Quality education is education that works for every child and enables all children to achieve their full potential. UNICEF

Today architect,  Joe Wiegerinck from Creative Innovation Architects, came to our school to work with an enrichment group of students who are designing a school for a community in Afghanistan based on the UNICEF Child Friendly Schools Design Manual criteria. Joe firstly helped the students to identify five key areas for consideration before beginning to design any building.

They are:

  1. Site – Is it a remote location? Is it a safe place? Does it slope? Does it have a view? What infrastructure is nearby?
  2. Who? – Who are we building for? What age group?
  3. Culture – What beliefs and cultural implications need to be considered?
  4. Materials – What local materials are available? Timber, stone or mud?
  5. Needs? – What do we want this structure to give the owners? What are their needs/purpose of the building? i.e. classrooms, kitchen, toilets…

Students were then taken through the rough planning stage as they decided on classrooms, administration buildings, gardens, prayer facilities and a soccer field for example. After this Joe showed the students how to create a scale plan that included doors, windows and furniture. Next week we will finish our rough plans and commence transforming those plans to scale on large sheets of graph paper. Afghan students from Coffs Harbour High School will be joining the group in week four to select a location for the individual school designs. The students will need to create justifications for their projects before they are able to begin building their models using virtual 3D technology or concrete materials.

This is a wonderfully rich and very rewarding project and I think Mrs Newton, Mrs Booth and Yarob are enjoying it as much as the children!  Many thanks again to Joe for taking the time to visit our school and teach our students about some of the design principles an architect uses 🙂

Mrs Booth, Mrs Newton and Yarob

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