Primary school children will become mini movie stars in a new project to produce a series of films teaching youngsters how to resolve disputes peacefully.
The Red Bay Primary School film project was one of two proposals to be granted funding at the Joanna Clarke awards on Saturday. The other winning bid was for a grant to help provide a new picture-based communication system for children with speech difficulties. The award money will enable young children in the Cayman Islands early intervention programme to have their own picture books and cards to communicate with.
Amy Hunt, school counsellor at Red Bay Primary School, said the funding was crucial to the Stop and Think Social Skills training project. She said the plan was to make five short films showing children using good social skills to resolve conflict.
Drama and media studies students from the high schools will also have the chance to take part in the production of the films, which will become a teaching tool for schools across Grand Cayman.
Ms Hunt said: “The scenes will be things like rough play during free time or a child feeling left out during play time and being self conscious and shy about not being able to make friends.”
She said the message would hit home more strongly because the films would show Caymanian children in a local context.
“I think it’s a good way to get them talking and to make it more personal for them, with their own peers involved at their own school. It is also a good way of getting parents involved.
“I think it is extremely important that we start looking at healthy conflict resolution skills as soon as possible,” she added.
Ms Hunt will seek input from teachers before producing a set of scripts along with playwright Patricia Bent, who is a teacher at the school. The filming will begin in October.
The second project to win funding at Saturday’s event, organised by business conglomerate the DMS Organisation, was a bid by the government’s speech and language department to set up a picture exchange communication system for children with speaking difficulties.
Sarah Hassell, a representative of the government’s early intervention programme, said the system would be used by young children. She said staff had paid for their own training and set up a trial of the system using homemade picture cards and books.
“We made our own basic version of picture cards and books and we have seen how well they work,” she said. “We realised how good it is for our children and we put together a proposal because without extra funding we wouldn’t have been able to take this forward.”
She said the money would go toward purchasing picture books and other materials from the international body which administers the visual language system.
“This is something that once they learn they need this book and picture cards for some time, so they have to be built to last,” she added. “Some will need it always, others will use it for a while as a bridge to speech. The funding will allow us to purchase the official PECS books and materials.”
The idea of the system is that children build up a dictionary of pictures and learn to ask for things using picture cards. At a more advanced level, they use the cards to learn how to construct sentences.
“It is a recognised system that has been used in the States and in the UK for some time. It is for children who can’t speak or who are learning to speak and don’t know what words are for,” Ms Hassell said.
The two projects were chosen from a shortlist of five for the coveted annual Joanna Clarke Excellence in Education award. The winners were announced at a gala held at Grand Old House in George Town on Saturday.
The scholarship winner at this year’s event was Erica Powell, a teaching assistant at Red Bay Primary, who will get funding to help her pursue a bachelor of arts degree in elementary education at the University of Tampa.
DMS President Don Seymour said he was proud of the impact the annual awards had on the island.
“What could be more important than the young minds of these islands? It’s not enough to prop up the status quo,” he said. “The prosperity that we have experienced as a nation demands that we invest soundly in its future – and these young minds.”
DMS introduced the award to honour education pioneer Joanna Clarke in 2007, and publicly acknowledge the efforts of all persons and organisations that contribute to education in the Cayman Islands.
Ms Clarke, who was involved in picking the winning projects, said it had been a tough choice.
“I think we all agreed that we were sorry there was not enough to spread it out even more than we had but the two projects that were chosen to share the award were very noteworthy.”
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