Story Hub: Sunshine Primary School
We recently finished evaluating our three-year Story Hubs pilot program.
We’re sharing the stories of those first Hubs in this series of articles.
A place of light and dark magic...
We delivered the co-design process for the Sunshine Hub in 2019. The school’s Year 5/6 students ran workshops for the younger year levels - and they loved this opportunity. The workshops generated hundreds of ideas from students across the whole school. A smaller working group of students analysed the themes in those ideas and turned them into short “concept stories”. Then the whole school voted on which story to use for the Hub, settling on: “A place of light and dark magic where artefacts from other worlds are kept.”
Artist Alia Syed Rose developed the final design with the working group students. Alia modified windows and added lights, drapes and curtains to bring magical light and darkness to the room. She also created artefacts chosen by the students, including turning a door into a magic portal, and suspending a magic wand from the ceiling in a special transparent box! The creative classroom officially opened in late 2019, with guidebooks created by the students guiding guests through the artefacts.
Unlike the Geelong and Meadows Hubs, Sunshine’s Story Hub was coordinated by a senior teacher within the school rather than the school principal. Despite the interruption of COVID and the departure of the coordinating teacher, we still delivered Professional Learning to a specific teaching team, and as one-off, whole-school sessions.
Every class uses the Story Hub for an hour of writing each week, and students and teachers have found it very helpful - you can hear them talk about their experience using the Hub in our recent video!
