The Round House Primary Academy
Round House Primary Academy is our third Fantastical Cambridgeshire school partner. This is the Fantastical Map that we created together. Below it is one of our favourite images by photographer Maciek Platek of the community day and also a short film made with his drone.
Filipa Pereira-Stubbs and Sally Todd worked as the artists in residence at the school during the spring of 2017. Starting with Year Three but later involving the whole school, children were creatively adventuring – investigating and discovering all sorts of extraordinary adventures in and around Love’s Farm. Before the residency started CCI had a chance to get to know all the staff through a creative session run by Sally and Filipa.
Through Wild Exchanges we have also been introducing some of the children’s ideas and discoveries into the working worlds of adult professionals in many walks of life - as inspiration for new work and prompts to remember where their own fascinations began.
Our work has concluded with a new community project - artist Helen Stratford worked with the residents of Love’s Farm to produce the first ever Fantastical Community Day on Love’s Farm estate. Over a 24 hour period on the 30 June and 1 July, the whole community were invited to share their own discoveries and help to create a fantastical map of the estate.
Elena Arévalo Melville worked with all these strands of discovery and creative expression to develop the Fantastical Map of the local area –as a legacy of the project and an invitation for everyone to keep exploring.
A many layered map
17/10/2017
This fantastical map was made collaboratively and contains over 100 layers of drawings and words and ideas, incorporating the work of children and adults alike – all carefully connected by illustrator Elena Arévalo Melville.
We think of this as a fantastical map because it combines real and imaginary places and stories. We explored many ways of adventuring in and around the Round House Primary Academy and Love’s Farm together as individual school classes and during our 24 hour Fantastical Love’s Farm Community Day.
Many of our creative adventures began by spending time playing with renaming streets and spaces – seeing the everyday in new unexpected ways. The key below indicates how some of the elements on this map were created:
Playing with renaming streets and spaces; walking and seeing the everyday in new ways – new names created included Slug Neots, Leafton and Great High Sky, a clearing became the Corn Field of Happiness and the hill was renamed Snake Path.
Discovering and imagining underground histories - a Round House, Greek Goddess Minerva, skulls and bones.
Real and fantastical mythologies – James Toller’s fantastical playground and ‘the pig washed with wood’.
Real leaves from Auntie’s Woods and ‘Love’s Farm Blooms’ – community planting to create pondering places.
Exploring in miniature to open a whole new world – pond, forest snail, Dutch elm disease and fantastical flowers.
Looking up to explore real and fantastical thoughts and creatures – A Sky Goddess, her parliament of owls and bats.
Real landmarks including the school, Cambridge Road, Auntie’s Woods (renamed the Tree Land of the Mythical) and the train line.
A sky goddess, underground discoveries & Minerva world
20/07/2017
(Helen Stratford, producer of our Fantastical Love’s Farm Community Day at The Round House Primary Academy, looks back on the day) With thunderclouds gathering, we start the 24hrs with some trepidation. It begins with some fantastical tasters at the school fair on Friday afternoon in anticipation of the big day on Saturday.
Parents and children crowd around the Fantastical Bookmarks, created by 8 and 9 year olds, chatting to Arts and Music Coordinator Mrs Rodgers and Year 3 teacher Mr Colborne who are running the stall. Next door the amazing Minerva world takes shape at the hands of families with CCI artists Sally Todd and Filipa Pereira Stubbs. Lengths of the Cairngorms and Italy form the skirt and legs of the goddess Minerva, whose archaeological discovery during construction of Love’s Farm has inspired children throughout the residency. The nearby tent of extraordinary sounds is adorned by Fantastical Cambridgeshire bunting specially designed by the children. Later, the tent’s wonderful night time wildlife sounds inspire amazing drawings of volcanoes, thunder and fantastical worlds by children at Love’s Farm House youth group with Jo Holland and Helen Tame.
Minerva, wildlife and fantastical underground adventures are the main themes for Saturday as the school is transformed into our base camp, with extraordinary activities including Fantastical Map Stations with Sally and Filipa, Botanical Slides with teacher Catherine Gregorious and Fantastical Belonging Mapping and Found Mapping led by Neotist artists Melina Lafirenze and Clair and Richard Slade. All these findings contribute to a 3D Sky, Eye and Underground map with Elena Arévalo Melville and myself. The map’s amazing clay, tape and drawn creations of underground creatures and fossils grow throughout the day with belonging thought bubbles and one-minute maps floating above.
As with the previous two Fantastical Community Days, at Eynesbury and Offord Primary Schools, there are explorations of the local area too. A crowd of adults and children trek to nearby Auntie’s Woods with teacher Miss Abbot, the County’s Arboriculturalist Richard Rice and local bat expert Caroline Jackson, exploring with clay creations, specially created backpacks from the Cambridge University Botanic Gardens and flora maps created by local foraging expert Phyllis Hooper, while St Neots Museum’s Mystery Table and the fantastically titled ‘Magical Mystery Walks – with a Sky Goddess’ are an amazing draw with animal skins, antlers and the remains of a local shrine. In fact, it is Minerva the Sky Goddess herself who steals the day’s adventuring. While the thunder stays away and the sun shines, standing among the display of enormous drawings made by the children of Minerva and her parliament of owls, Liz Davies curator from St Neots Museum makes a special announcement that after a long journey the actual Minerva discovered underneath Love’s Farm is finally coming home to be part of a new exhibition at the Museum.
Together with the children’s discoveries made during the artist residency at the school, these amazing events and outcomes from the day are all being fed into the creation of the Fantastical Map of Love’s Farm being put together over the summer by illustrator Elena Arévalo Melville.
We’d like to thank photographer Maciek Platek from the brilliant Neotists group for his film from above (shown at the top of this page) and many of the photos shown here. We also couldn’t have managed without our wonderful team of CCI volunteers – Sue Bainbridge, Bridget Cusack and Lois Gillie-Andrews.
Fantastical Love’s Farm
05/07/2017
At 3.30 on Friday 30th June we started our fantastical 24 hour adventure with families in and around Love’s farm. We worked alongside expert children, The Neotists, St Neots Museum, teaching staff and all sorts of enthusiasts and together we had an extraordinary day.. With hundreds of people on the Friday and almost 200 more on the Saturday it was our busiest Fantastical Day ever. Below is a flavour of the day – from producing the magnificent Minerva and her parliament of owls to drawing surprising sounds and creating fantastical stone creatures.
We came with an open mind and it was so different, so great for kids (Dad).
I learnt why the Round House is called the Round House (Leah).
I loved going to the woods (Grace).
The museum objects were really interesting (Dad).
I liked collecting things to put in the sticky things (Stephanie).
The tent of extraordinary sounds was so different – hearing frogs and ladybirds and wasps. And I loved Colour my park (Iestyn, 8).
Creative adventuring for a whole school
04/07/2017
(by Joanna Holland)
Until June CCI artists have worked in residence with 7 and 8 year olds at The Round House Primary Academy. But today was different. Today the whole school was invited to adventure creatively in and around their school and Love’s Farm alongside CCI artists and teachers.
From minute maps to pondering about ponds and wild spaces, 420 children were invited to have a taste of Fantastical Cambridgeshire; getting ready for Fantastical Love’s Farm – an adventure for the whole community on 30th June.
Children explored the language of mapping from constellations and aeroplane to navigation maps and Polynesian stick charts: What is it? A bowl? A cup? A volcano? A spiders web?
Martina and Sarah worked together to combine a mind map with a map of DNA to create…
… a language of patterns (Martina).
Others adventured to Auntie’s Woods and back, travelling up the newly named ‘Hippo Hill’ to get there and creating some fantastical creatures along the way.
I’ve made a map of faces (Lucas).
Those that explored Love’s Farm named roads that had no names – playing with geography and creating new places before arriving at their local community centre Love’s Farm House. Here they created ‘one minute maps’ and added extraordinary things to the huge Fantastical Map.
Children also got to look at the everyday in meticulous detail. Grass and Daisy’s became the most beautiful and delicate botanical slides.
We also had exciting loans from St Neots Museum. We thought about what is underneath, handling Roman pottery and talking about the huge excavation that had taken place underneath the homes of Love’s Farm.
I loved it – it reminded me of spy history.
It was the busiest of days but the best of days – so many new things to see in our everyday.
Walking the Landscape
21/06/2017
(by Filipa Pereira-Stubbs) Our last residency day with the Goldfinches and the sun shone even as the wind blew. The children set off to map the immediate landscape - we had walked the streets once before, but now took the time to settle into landscapes and draw what we saw. We imagined new place names and thought about how naming a place could reflect an experience that had taken place there.
Perspective became an intriguing riddle. We played with scale and drew landscapes to their horizons, drawing the tiniest of flowers in detail. Some children experimented with using flowers and grass to bring colour into our drawings.
I can feel the air. Jed
My street’s going to be called - Cold Valley ....or Freezing Valley because it’s cold and it is a little bit freezing. Paige
I’m calling it Danger Zone because at night the Foxes come out. Ronnie
My pencil’s bigger than a lamppost and a house. Alex
Now me and Daisy are in Stone Daffodil land. Paige
