Connect to Create

Connect to Create

Head of Enrichment Sam Sterrett

Connect to Create, now into its third year at the College, is an initiative aimed at further strengthening our crosscampus connections and provide opportunities for both young and old students to collaborate around common areas of interest in the context of passion projects.

As part of the IB Diploma CAS Project (Creativity, Action, Service), Year 12 mentors planned, organised and delivered 5 projects over the course of a term to provide an additional layer of enrichment for a group of Year 4 Junior School students in creative writing, chess, the stock market, digital photography and art.

Samuel Magtengaard (Year 5) & Pablo Munoz Morillo (Year 12)

The programme consisted of 3 components; a project launch event, six student led one hour workshops and a final exhibition for Junior parents as a showcase of their sons’ learning. Exhibition products included live chess games, photo galleries, company case studies, literary readings and deconstructions and portraits.

Year 12 students quickly learnt how challenging teaching can be, reflecting on the need to re-calibrate and pitch their level of instruction appropriately, pacing the lesson and also managing behaviour and productive output.

“We underestimated just how good they were at learning chess already.” (Year 12 Hugh Fellows-Smith, Chess)

Hugh Fellows-Smith (Year 12), Zhuo Chen (Year 5), Gianluca Mastrocinque (Year 12), Oscar Lawton (Year 5), Daniel Maginn (Year 5)

“The most enjoyable part of the process was to help the boys work towards the final exhibition, a case study of companies the boys were interested in including Lamborghini and Apple.” (Year 12 Michael Gao, Stock Market)

“We discovered that each boy has his own particular type of creativity.” (Year 12 Pablo Munoz Morillo, Art)

Their flexibility and patience was evident and the younger students responded with enthusiasm and relish at the prospect of learning from ‘the big boys’ sharing their own reflections on the experience:

“I wrote a story about war and I learnt from the older kids how to use gustatory imagery and tactile imagery in my story.” (Year 4 Seb Lucas, Creative Writing)

“I loved how they would teach us things they hadn’t fully learnt yet themselves…and they are really funny!” (Year 4 Rowan Sundaresan, Stock Market)

A huge thank you to Junior School Enrichment Coordinator, Alison Webster, for organising so much of the programme and to Jane Roche, Sue Mitchell, Jeannette Weeda for providing guidance to the Year 12s and duty of care for each workshop.