Helping share the love

As I've shown you here before, as part of my other job of working in a school, I often get asked to produce class reference sheets. Now, I'm not sure about you but a lot of the work sheets that flopped onto my desk at school failed to inspire me, with their word document, clip-art thrown together nature.
Bad design can make dull even the most exciting topic so I decided to have a bash at getting them to actually read and take in the information the teachers are trying to express.

The first one is a help guide on making a inspirational sketchbook, to try and get students to open up and try new ways of conveying their thoughts.

I like to include lots of little drawings and font styles, encouraging the students to explore the sheet and engage with the information within it.

And I designed it to fold up into a little pocket sized reference guide for the students to take away and store in the front of their own sketchbooks.

Next up was explaining to the students how to help their ideas flow from and original stand point...Mindmaps!

Now, it took me a good full hour researching to realise that mind maps is the new (overtly PC if you ask me) way of saying 'Brain storms' and to help the students see how ideas can generate other ideas I did a mind map on the subject of 'Holidays'

On the back of the worksheet I gave them a 'blank brain' to help them start there very own mind map!

The final help sheet I have made recently is one that I was extra enthusiastic to make (for my own evangelical reasons)...A Guide To Screen Printing!

 
The students learn how to screen print using the stencil method (where you cut the image you want out of a piece of card and stick it to the screen for a temporary method of printing your image) so the inside of the guide is a step-by-step photographic reference for all you need to know.

What do you think? Shouldn't school work sheets be a bit more exciting? Perhaps I should right to the people who make the textbooks?! We could start a 'Good design starts in school' revolution!