THANK YOU FOR BOOKING YOUR INCURSION WITH US

We hope that you have recieved and been able to give us all the information required to make this the best experience possible for every participant.

Please feel free to contact us any time should you want to add detail, or if the details of your booking have changed.

hello@greenhatworkshop.com.au

Workshop fees are based on $5pp. with a minimum of $450+GST for a single session and $800+GST for a full school day.

Workshops that are in different locations incur a full fee for each set up.

For regional areas that are more than an hours’ travel froim Melbourne GPO there is an additional travel levy of $2.20 per km.

GREEN HAT WORKSHOP MEDIA

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. Please ensure there is clear access without steps. After setting up a display and arranging the PLANKS kits in the space participants arrive and sit in front of the display where they recieve a short presentation about building technique and some ideas to open up the possibility of the PLANKS’ use; Often this is followed by a short series of ‘closed’ warm up activities and then the floor is opened to the participants’ own ideas – “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 HASS topic or construction.
• 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.

Venue / Location guidance

The most appropriate building surface is a flat, even, indoor one, with trolley access and large enough to contain 80cm² or more for each participant.

Participants work on the floor, so a swept floor is preferable.

This activity is not run within multiple spaces but takes place in a single location per booking. Multiple locations are viewed as multiple bookings and will be billed accordingly.
Access is required up to an hour prior to the workshop; shorter setup times are negotiable but may impact on the workshop. 

If we are taking over a gym hall or multipurpose room it goes without saying that other staff and timetables etc need to be reminded of our sessions.

We hope to use a raised surface, be it a stage or two trestle tables, to create several demonstration constructions that we use in our introductory presentation.

Whole school timetable guidance

Our facilitators prefer longer periods of time with more participants.
Optimum time frames are 1.5 to 2 hours for a workshop with up to 100 participants.

We understand however that timetables are often quite inflexible and we regulary compromise in this regard. We hope that teachers consider booking workshops for two days over the decision to compress a workshop into an hour, as the authentic, self-driected learning of the workshop is reduced.

If a session needs to be split into two sessions however our preference is for a short session to be first and then a long session following.

Our expectation is that we work with a new group for each session and not one group for the whole day.

Depending on the dynamic of each group, we suggest the timing for Foundation and Grade 1 students is optimally 1 hour with grades 3-6 1.5-2hrs.

Sample timetables:
Example 1 & 2 are our preferred

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 time 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.

IMAGES OF OUR WORK