Old friends

Creative Practitioners can be a 'new face' in school, it's one of the reasons we are employed, and consequently most projects involve meeting new students. It's always nice then, when one sees familiar faces in a group. Today I worked with year three at Paganel Primary School who I last worked with around this time last year. I took small groups out of their regular lessons to interview each other on the subject of their recent school trips. With each group, I began by asking them what they remembered about last year's project. In most cases they began telling me this without being asked!
Why talk about last year's project, when it has nothing to do with what we're doing now? I wasn't sure at all, and it was some time before I realised that what we were doing replaced the 'getting to know you' activities that I would do with a new group. We were reestablishing a working relationship that was a year old. I believe that our experience of time is roughly relative to the total time we have lived, therefore one year for an eight/nine year old would be equivalent to over four years for me. After this kind of break, reminiscing is a natural way to begin again.
We then had a whole class session for the last hour and a half of the day, editing the interviews together with video taken on the school trips. We edited on the smart board with the students taking turns to come up to the board and work on the video. After about twenty minutes of this, the teacher took around half of the class, who were unable to focus on what we were doing any longer, out to allow the other half, who were benefiting from the experience, to continue. We edited two comments together with two clips over the whole period of time. Pretty slow going to be sure, but the we were working to a standard above anything that has been edited by pupils of any year in school up to now.