PLACES (People, Location, Architecture, Community, Environment, Sentiment) our collaborators, helped us understand and prepare us for working with children. We were shown previous projects that they had undertaken in Manchester and explained how we could help the children explore their creative side by creative a narration and encouraging them to experiment and involve their different sense in the project.

In preparation for the building of the dens, we created some weird and wonderful creations that could be used as a source of inspiration for the children who could use our creations to either incorporate into their dens or just use as a tool to understand how different components could be attached together.

The building of the dens showed how the children learnt to interact with the space available to them but it also showed us how they appropriated the space and created an identity to the place. At the presentation given to us by the collaborators we were told that the identity of a place comes from the quality and intensity of the sensory links. Therefore by building, choosing the design, choosing what materials would be used the children involved all their senses allowing them to give a meaning to the place that they created.

At our presentation given to us by PLACES, an organisation dedicated to working on projects with children we were told that "we work and learn from the children". This experience would be a "creative immersion for the children" and indeed we saw this as they drew and built the different dens. As one of the collaborators said "this is how children see the world and make it their own".

I believe that allowing the children to invent their own stories about the dens surrounding the alien theme brought something to us students as well. Indeed we learnt that there are no boundaries to our creativity. So many different ideas sprouted from a common theme and it was interesting to see how different students could respond to a same subject. I learnt that it is interesting to think outside the box as many children did!

Drawing on the rooftop allowed the children to show their creative side. The drawings led to the invention of crazy stories following our alien theme. The children loved giving names and magical powers to their aliens!

The children loved drawing with the chalk, loved getting their involved in the drawings by using their hands and sometimes even their clothes! Using different color chalks they created wild and wondrous stories about their dens.

Showing the children from the school around university was an experience in itself. Who knew that wind coming from air-vents or the air-conditioning by the doors could be entertaining? They loved the different textures and were curious about everything.