Billy Goats Gruff challenge pupils and parents

St Bernard’s Nursery hosted a ‘Billy Goats Gruff Challenge’ yesterday ahead of World Book Day, with children and parents working jointly to resolve a challenge-based problem.

The 40 children and their parents were set a task following the school receiving a letter from Billy Goats Gruff.

Head teacher Sonia Lopez said: “Billy Goats Gruff wrote a letter to the children asking for their help because they were having tremendous problems getting to the green grass in the field and there was a horrible troll that was preventing them.”

Billy Goats Gruff Challenge 060319 ( Views John Bugeja ) session at Governor's Meadow First School as part of World Book celebrations

The children, with their parents, had to engage in a problem solving activity where they had to design a bridge to get over to the green grass.

“What we are doing in this is celebrating within Book Week and the topic of fairy tales we are bringing together the different cultures we are trying to embed in the school,” Ms Lopez explained.

“We are bringing in the four Cs which we believe are the fundamental foundations of children’s learning. We want to build creativity, communication, collaboration and critical thinking,” she added.

In addition, the school brought in a recently added project based learning it recently introduced; resilience.

Billy Goats Gruff Challenge 060319 ( Views John Bugeja ) session at Governor's Meadow First School as part of World Book celebrations

The idea behind the Billy Goats Gruff challenge is to bring the parents into the school to work with the children as the school is looking at problem-based enquiry.

“At this stage with the very youngest children it needs to be a lot more structured model and we are also showing the parents how we want to develop these skills in the children as they go throughout the school and indeed throughout the education system.”

The creative aspect of the challenge comes from having to think of ways to build the bridge so they can help the Billy Goats Gruff.

“They are using their communication skills working with their parents and obviously the collaboration and critical thinking, problem solving how they can do it and being creative in the way they bring it out,” Ms Lopez said.

“Mixed with the resilience where we have a mantra for the children where we have to understand the problem, think about solutions and keep going ahead and never give up,” she added.

Pics by Johnny Bugeja