Phew! After a lot of gathering materials and sifting and figuring out and packing and unpacking the car over the last couple of weeks I was finally ready and today I took the road for Donaghey. It was great to meet the children -some of them for the first time in “real life”. As I have come to expect and hope, we had a really great day. I introduced some of my work that relates to this theme and we examined the materials I had brought along. We did some testers to see how the different surfaces reacted to the pencils, pens, crayons, charcoal and paints that the children use and the class got lots of ideas about how to make use of them.

I asked the class about bringing their research work together in a form that we could share with people outside the project. We are thinking of maybe some sort of book. I showed them a little book that I had created when I was 5 years old. We looked at different ways of combining text and images and then they needed to have a go at making a potential page. I had the chance to talk to each person about their ideas for the project and look at their journals. I am genuinely inspired by the amount of work they have been doing so far. We have so much great material -it’s a valuable knowledge base to use and build on. Everyone has a strong subject to explore and we will be looking at different ways to do this over the next few weeks. Some of the class waited patiently all day for their chance to show me their work and I was so engrossed I didn’t take any photos at all.

Just ……. another amazing day in Donaghey.