What’s in a picture?

Maybe this is an idea that has been used before. But I tried it for the first time this week and it worked really well. This year we have started using the SEALs material for our PSHE lessons. As with all material it needs a bit of thought and adaptation to work in each class but on the whole it is very good stuff. You can download it from The Standards Site.

This term we have been talking about Getting On and Falling Out. One aspect of this was looking at the reasons people fall out and talking about the fact that there are always (at least) two sides to an argument. One example of this was giving the children the same story but from two different points of view. They were able to see that both people thought the other person was being unreasonable.

To accompany this I asked the children to spend a bit of time in small groups (I used groups of three) thinking about a freeze frame they could show. They then took a photo of this freeze frame and we collected the photos together to display on the interactive whiteboard. Simply using the view as slideshow tool in Windows we looked at each photo in turn. We spent a few moments discussing what the photo could be of. It was interesting to hear the discussions that went on – at first the children who were in the photo thought they could correct anyone who suggested a different idea to theirs but soon began to realise how it worked. One particularly good example was a picture of two children who decided to hold a karate pose. Everyone else thought that the picture looked like one person playing a trombone and the other doing a dance to the music.

I’ve followed it up throughout the week by stopping the children at certain points and asking how else something could be interpreted – reminding children to consider other people’s point of view before they jump to conclusions.

You can see some of the pictures the children took on the Class 2 pages of the school website.