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Deliver Great Assemblies On A Shoestring

Send in the marching band, start the fireworks and introduce the celebrity speaker. What’s that? We don᾿t have the budget? It’s just me, talking? How can I make this engaging?

Mike Kent
by Mike Kent
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Most of us, especially older teachers, remember school assemblies that bored us to tears. The days where we didn’t actually fall asleep, we couldn’t believe that time could stand still for so long. But, it doesn’t have to be like that.

Primary assemblies should be an engaging learning experience. Young children have a real thirst for knowledge, so by providing a great start to the day, children can be inspired and motivated, while teachers can garner ideas and themes which they may want to develop in their own classrooms.

Often, I would bring my own hobbies and interests into an assembly, and these themes could last for a week or more. With classic cars, I showed children how I restored a 1970s Mini, starting on Monday with a photograph of the vehicle as it was when I bought it, and finishing on Friday with a picture of a gleaming, fully restored automobile.

In between, they learned how a car works and how I restored all the various parts. On other occasions I’ve showed the children how I taught myself the banjo, designed and built a garden workshop and turned some banister rails on my woodworking lathe for a member of staff.

But an interesting assembly can be created from the simplest of ideas and with a minimal amount of preparation. Get a sheet of white A1 paper, a big pair of scissors and a glue stick and you’re ready to go. Tell the children you’re going to show them an interesting mathematical puzzle.

Cut four strips from the paper, each measuring about 60cm x 8cm. Take the first strip, put a little glue on one end and paste it into a circle. Now say you’re going to push the scissors into the strip and cut all the way round the circle, and as you cut, ask the children what you’ll end up with. They will say, rightly of course, that you’ll end up with two separate loops, each about 4cm wide.

Next, take another strip, join the ends again, but just before you do so, give one end of the strip a half turn. Again cut all the way round the loop, and ask what you’ll end up with. The children will probably say two loops again, but in fact you end up with one very large loop.

Then take the third strip, and before gluing give one end a full turn. What do you end up with this time? Surprisingly, two linked rings. So what would happen if you gave the fourth strip a turn and a half? Or two turns? The children could experiment with this in their classrooms, but in the meantime you could finish the assembly by telling them about the mathematician Mobius.

Sometimes, I’d start an assembly very simply with just a word. ‘Impossible’, for example. “What does it mean?” I’d say. “Something you can’t do,” the children would reply. And then I’d show that it wasn’t necessarily so.

After seating five teachers on a wooden gymnastics bench, I challenged a tiny infant pupil to lift up the bench. The children said it was impossible…and then, to their great amusement, I put a car jack under one end of the bench and the infant pumped it up with ease. This led to a discussion on other amazing machines and how they work; the crane, for example, which was being used on a housing development opposite the school.

And once I’d shown how the impossible could become possible, more ideas quickly came to mind and provided assemblies for a whole week. It was easy for a child to cut a hole in a sheet of paper that they could put their hand through, but could they cut a hole in a postcard that they could climb through? Impossible? Not at all.

And surely it was impossible for a sentence like ‘Tom, where Fred had had had had had had had had had had been the correct answer’ to make any sense at all? No, with the correct punctuation it was indeed possible. (All is revealed in Amazing Assemblies for Primary Schools!)

Amazing Assemblies for Primary Schools by Mike Kent is published by Crown House Publishing.

Mike was a headteacher for 30 years and spent his entire career in primary education, He has co-authored 27 musical plays for primary schools and written three books on education.

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