I was in Donaghey yesterday for a real visit. I’ve been communicating with Mrs Wilson and the class via e-mail since I worked with them last. They have been really busy selecting work for inclusion in the the class book and getting everything scanned in.

Yesterday we were finalising titles and text for the book. We started off by laying out all the images in the hall and thinking about different ways of organising them. The work looked good when the children put everything in groups with similar techniques -pen and wash work together, charcoal work together, collage work together etc. When these pieces of work went into an order one after the other it wasn’t so interesting to see so many similar images together. The children decided that they need to mix things up so we laid everything out again and tried to create variety instead.

In trying to pick an order, each person chose an image -not one of their own – that they thought should come first in the book. They didn’t discuss their choices but it turned out that there was a lot of agreement -many of them had chosen one of five or six pictures. We talked about reasons for their choices: because the image represented home and the project (and book) was called “Dwell”, because it was about maps/signs/places/family and we had thought a lot about these things during the sessions. We looked at the group maps that the class had done early on in the project and decided to include these in the book too. We thought that the group maps helped to pull the work together by place so we worked on putting the material into order within these “chapters”.

While some of the class were doing some final bits and pieces of research, the rest worked on ideas for the introduction to the book. We took these back to the class and everyone chose a topic to write about individually or in pairs. The ideas were flying and they worked intensively, covered just about every aspect of the project. We are all so immersed in the work that it’s very hard to stop. This is officially my last contact with the group but I know that we will be in touch again at least once before the end of term as the book comes together in its final form. So I won’t sum up the experience or give a final perspective just yet -we’ll all remain in denial for a little while longer.