March 26th was our last session on the ‘Virtually There’ journey. Everybody was disappointed to be ending this very new and enjoyable learning experience. The morning was again full of activity and the three hours flew.

One of our activities involved working with our origami boxes. We had a bag full of them at this stage. One group at a time chose a corner or part of the classroom to work at and a piece of furniture to work against. They used the origami boxes to build a structure and the piece of furniture to ‘prop’ it up. This activity was not as easy as it sounded as the boxes were different sizes and not all of them had right angled corners! It took longer than expected to build a structure that would stand up but who said every structure has to stay standing!

Another activity involved the children finishing off the map of the village of Ardfert. They coloured in all the buildings, roads and green areas. When the road was complete they stuck on pieces of white paper and wrote numbers on them. These numbers would then be used to when playing the game.

The questions and instructions that had been thought of last week had to be cut out and stuck together.

The children also made counters/characters to move around when playing the game.

The last activity that all children took part in was a pair activity. In pairs the children constructed a picture using a photograph of a trace of the past that they had taken a number of weeks ago. Each child cut out a piece of the photo and worked with their partner to form a picture from the two pieces of their photos. They stuck them onto an A3 sheet of paper and drew a picture around it. This was a great activity for using their imagination.

So as the last session came to a close we were ready to play our new boardgame. The four children that got to play the first game were Aaron, Bryan, Tom and Ethan.

As can be seen from the facial expressions the children were very proud of their game and were delighted to play it. We didn’t have time to make our own dice out of 4 of the origami boxes so we had to use a ready-made dice but we will make one soon to complete our own game.

We all loved being part of the Virtually There project. We learned allot from Vanya and we had lots of fun during the 6 weeks. The 3rd class children and I would like to thank the Tralee Education Centre and Kidsown for choosing us to be part of this wonderful collaborative project with Vanya our artist.