Arlo's Wee Adventure
Designed for Edinburgh's New Sick Kid's Hospital, this engaging journal and treasure hunt activity pack will take children on Arlo's adventure of change. Subtly developing children's autonomy and normalising change in a playful, creative and interactive way.
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The book follows Arlo's life in the stages of metamorphosis. Each stage has a different activity attached to it, involving the children and allowing them to understand the process of change.
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Additional activities that children can complete idly are also available in the book such as colouring in pages and wordsearches. These were included as we are aware this would be used in a hospital environment and situations may arise that would limit movement on patients. Due to this we also encourage the children to work through this activity book at their own pace and when they are feeling up to it.
Activity 1: Laying Eggs
The first activity in the book invites the children to decorate Arlo's egg in whatever way they like. Children in the hospital already receive a 'studio box' filled with a lot of arts and crafts supplies, we anticipate that they can make use of this box throughout the duration of completing Arlo's Wee Adventure activity book.
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Once the child has decorated their egg, they can go and pin up their design alongside other children's creations at a dedicated wall within the hospital.
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There will be a pull-out map available within the book to enable easy navigation around the hospital to find all activities available.
Activity 2: Growing Arlo
Throughout the hospital, there are bead stations, which are marked on the map within the book. A piece of ribbon with a bead of Arlo's face comes with the activity book. The children are able to grow Arlo's body by visiting these bead stations and acquiring beads to put onto their ribbon.
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Each book will come with a token, stored in a treasure chest. These tokens activate the bead stations, working like a gumball machine. This allows for only one need to be acquired at each station per child, allowing a fair treasure hunt for all the children.
Activity 3: Arlo's Chrysalis
Once Arlo has fully grown, Arlo can be used as a bookmark or he can be stored in his chrysalis pocket available within the book.
Activity 4: Butterfly Installation
After being in a chrysalis Arlo emerges as a butterfly! Children are invited to craft a butterfly for installation space.
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As this will be displayed in the hospital, the options needed to be flexible as the availability of space may be limited.
Origami Butterfly
Hand Printed Butterfly
Example of a large scale installation if space was available.
Small scale mobile if space was limited in the hospital.
Extension to the Outdoors
The new Children's Hospital in Edinburgh offers a garden space to each children's ward, therefore we wanted to make use of this great space and incorporate an activity to utilise it.
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An Arlo bench where children can sit and enjoy the outdoor space will be placed in each garden space. On the side of the blocks that make up the bench, there will be rubbings that the children can take in their book, a few pages will be left blank allowing the children to collect all the different textures.
With the availability of the space outdoors, we explored what an outdoor butterfly installation would look like. Our outcome was laser cut MDF Arlo's that the children could paint and add crafts too and then hang up onto a tree outdoors with other children's work.
This project was created in collaboration with Textile Designer Kirsty Bruce, Textile Designer Katriona Downie, Textile Designer Shannon Keenan & Jewellery Designer Mae Fraser