Hi all, day 2 is drawing to a close and the children are just getting down to sleep after their evening activities of ‘mini-Olympics’, ‘scrapheap challenge’ and ‘mutation’ – the last one sounds a bit gruesome but it was basically a card game about werewolves – one child chose to ‘kill’ me when they were a werwolf – I pretended I wasn’t offended.
For coach 1, today was Rouen and for coach 2 they headed off to Albert to visit the WW1 battlefields. Our tour was well received by the children and when I asked them on the field later in the evening what they had learnt, they all came back with lots of interesting facts and figures.
One interesting moment occurred on our tour during a section on Joan of Arc (who met her end in Rouen) when our tour guide asked the children if they knew who Joan of Arc was and one chid said ‘yeh, they went two by two.’ The guide politely explained ‘that’s Noah’s Ark not Joan of Arc’ and then she asked me ‘what have you been teaching them?’ – sadly the national primary curriculum doesn’t cover The Hundred Years war – yet.
As we made our way around Rouen we came to the section on a burial pit for people who died of the black death, to our great surprise a local team of archaeologists were excavating some remains which was amazing for the children to see. I asked one of the archaeolgoists if they knew who the skeleton belonged to; they looked at me blankly and said the equivalent in French of ‘just some local guy’ – I guess if you ask a silly question….
As I write I have just had word from the girl’s side from Mrs Mackernan; she’s been doing her dorm inspections and as ever the girls have come up trumps in the creativity stakes. She has been given a French phrase book, had girls dancing out from beneath their beds and has even had a song about crepes. This is all with the aim of winning the coveted best dorm competition which is also under way at the boys side but we are still stuck on just shouting a motto for the ‘bonus’ category. Let’s hope for something more interesting tomorrow – I think I’ll ask for a World Cup based drama sketch from each dorm. I’ll let you know how it goes.
As ever, coach 1 had a great day and all children were happy.
Mr Williams is now going to blog about The Battlefields as he was with coach 2 after I pass my laptop over to him, he’s sat at the end of the boys corridor listening in for any late night chatter…
Mr Powell