Our Vision: Together we Nurture, Explore and Create for a Better Future

There was an excellent interview with Dr Peter O’Connor on Radio New Zealand this week…you can read a bit, and/or listen to it, here. He was speaking about the place of Creativity in schools, and how with the current educational changes underway…we can’t forget that Creativity can (and should) exist alongside/within strong academic programmes. It is seen easiest in our Play and Maker learning programs…those daily opportunities our lucky DPS Kids get to be their creative best selves. Down below are some digital art pieces by the Rimu children…in their play learning they were challenged to design a new New Zealand flag, and what a great job they did!

But, it is equally to be found inside academic learning…I’ve shared some poetry down below, very creative language being used. It can be seen in reading when children predict what might happen next, or draw a picture of what they believe the character to look like. It can be seen in maths…the varied and different ways children approach solving a problem, the unique and endless combination of numbers used to get to answer. 

In the interview he speaks about ‘playful thinking’ - and this is a term we talk about here at school. How can we design learning experiences that keep childrens playful thinking alive across their primary school years…something that the school system is very good at dampening. 

We were a part of a study run by Dr O’Connor and the Universities of Auckland and Sydney a couple of years ago, called the Creative Schools Index. This study looked at NZ and Australian schools to see how creative our learning programmes were, how creative our learning environments are and how creative our children get to be. We scored very highly (one of the highest), and Dr O’Connor was very complimentary of what the school is doing. 

And when we consider this high Creativity score, and that our children are doing very well academically…we really do have the best of both worlds here at DPS.