Boost student wellbeing

and inspire STEM curiosity with a self-directed Block-Play Incursion!

We offer:

• Single sessions of 1.5-2hrs. with up to 100 participants of all ages,
• Full day of sessions, each session with a different group,
• Family evenings for the extended school community,
• “Drop-in” activities for a school-wide events,
• Holiday programs
• An engaging whole school STEAM-play resource

At Green Hat Workshop we pride ourselves on running the most engaging school incursion program, for the largest number of students in one session, for the widest range of abilities and for the most extended length of time.

PLANKS Incursion – Format

Arriving at your school office an hour prior to the session, the Green Hat Workshop facilitator will sign in and then unload our collection 25 x 16kg boxes of PLANKS into the venue space. Participants arrive and receive a short presentation about building technique and some ideas to open up the possibility of the PLANKS’ use; then, “You can build whatever you want, with whoever you want, using as many PLANKS as you want…”

The most valuable aspect of each workshop is this period of time, running for about an hour and a half to two hours, where participants are engaged in free, open ended play. During this time our facilitators work hard to open up the potential learning in the activity through informal demonstration, question and prompted reflection.

Following are the focus of some of the workshops we have facilitated.

• Whole school whole day series. A day of sessions where each year level (up to 100 participants at once) participate in a session. Prep/Foundation having only an hour, with minimal presentation and more play, sometimes shared with their grade 6 ‘buddy’. Often this can be a celebration of a new term or school year or its conclusion, or even to mark an event or day of science or mathematics.
• Single session. One class or year level as a stand-alone activity or the conclusion to a Humanities and Social Studies topic..
• STEAM or Mathematics Family Evening. Aften after a day of PLANKS workshops, families attend an evening hour-long session and students show their parents what engineering ideas they’ve learned during the day.

While we specialise in working with primary aged children F-6, we regularly work with adults and up to year 9 secondary students, we have a wealth of experience and can adjust and collaborate with teachers to deliver programs to any age and ability.

Early Years

Children who are in their early years of education are mostly engaged in play-based learning as a central feature of their program and therefore in most cases we suggest the purchase of PLANKS rather than booking a workshop.

Our PLANKS workshops in kindergartens are often prompted by a group of super-builders who will stack and design with anything that is not nailed down. In this instance our workshops are an event in celebration of this creativity and often begin with a whole group and finish only with these dedicated engineers.
We suggest in these cases that staff are available to supervise other parallel activities and that the whole group are not compelled to participate for the full length of the workshop.

We love Kindergarten Parents’ Evenings and some of our most memorable experiences have been facilitating authentic play between parent and child.

Different abilities and specialist schools

The open ended nature of Green Hat Planks Workshops are one of a rare type of incursion which produces a challenging and creative atmosphere for every ability*.

PLANKS are intrinsically engaging for every participant at their optimum competence, without measurement, formal rules or external expectations. They can be positioned, stacked and balanced in as many ways as there are builders and the component nature of Planks means that repetitive stacking or patterning leads to outcomes that are just as exciting as more sophisticated engineering.

While our facilitators are not formally trained in special needs education, our partnership with many specialist groups and schools has led to some of our most memorable work. We regularly recieve feedback from specialist aides and Primary School Classroom Teachers that exceptional social development occurs during PLANKS play, with ALL of their students.

As our Facilitators work with an understanding of Piaget’s Constructivist theories of cognitive development and Green Hat Workshop’s core value of working with the people in front of us, rather than to a “turn-key” preprepared plan, means we are highly adaptable to the communities we work within.

*Participants need to have basic finger and arm dexterity, be able to physically hold, grasp and stack.