I had a real visit to Donaghey today and it was a surprise for the children -almost a shock for those who had only seen me through the whiteboard! I asked if there was any work from the sessions so far that they wanted to show me and they were happy to share drawings and paintings but no-one thought of sharing any sound recordings so far.

Some of the paintings are outstanding. Just beautiful.

I played my recording of the wind from the very first week and introduced them to Meredith Monk’s Early Morning Melody from Book of Days. They could hear that it was a young voice and without knowing what it was some of them said they thought it sounded like calm, morning time music. They thought it was a bit like meditation music and made some great yoga hand shapes. I had all of my sound recording kit with me and the children’s challenge was to think of the kind of sounds that they might make through a mic. Some were very very obscure and quiet noises. Very few of them wanted to make vocal sounds. We thought about noises that we could collect and the difference between these and noises that we could make ourselves. Some of the group went to the staff room to record, some stayed in the classroom -many of them wanted to record sounds made with paper and pencils and various pieces of stationery -stuff like rulers being twanged against the desk (Mrs Wilson did a great version of that). A few wanted to record noises like birdsong, wind and trees rustling. One wanted to record a buzzard. It was very exciting when a lorry started to reverse during one recording and we got a little bit of the noise. One person wanted to record the bell at lunchtime and we were trying to find out where the sound of the bell would come from. We got so involved in looking for it that we nearly missed the bell going altogether.

After lunch we listened to some of the sounds -there were mixed levels of success but it was a great experimental session. I sent the groups on a hunt for silence then. That was a very tricky challenge indeed! We had a debate about whether the work we were doing was art. About half of the class thought that painting was art but weren’t convinced about the other experiments. I will have to check back with them about that at a later date… Phew. Busy day. The real visits are always intense.