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Picking blackberries with Year Six

Throughout my career as a teacher and then a school leader, one of my primary motivations was to provide the children in my care with as many memorable experiences as possible. As the head of a small rural primary school, I had a teaching commitment, which gave me the chance to scratch that itch firsthand, so to speak.

One autumn, I decided to take the children blackberry picking and then ask them to plan and cook something that included the fruit we picked. My teaching slot was on a Friday afternoon, and the September sun was shining on this particular one, so we spent a lovely couple of hours picking blackberries in the fields surrounding the school. I believe that we came back with a hoard of around 3 kilos, just in time for hometime, which were then frozen for the following week.

Flash forward to the following July, on another Friday afternoon. The year six teacher had asked me to work with the children on their leavers' speeches. This was a tradition in our school, as I am sure it is in many primary schools, but we went a little bit further than most with a leavers' lunch, cooked by the children, before the speeches, and then a parents v children rounders match to finish off the afternoon.

As part of their speeches, I was trying to encourage the children to include some of their favourite memories from their seven years at our school, but they were having difficulty coming up with any. I am not going to attribute that to a failure on our part; in my experience, the children who left used to go through a period of emotionally disengaging from their primary school to reduce the impact of their big move.

Anyway, in my wisdom, I decided to use the example of our blackberry picking earlier in the year to get their minds working. I knew that they enjoyed the experience, but it was far from the most exciting thing they had done, so I was sure they would come up with some better ones.

Flash forward to the leavers' speeches on the last day of term. Much to my amusement, and to the frustration of the class teacher, every child mentioned our blackberry-picking experience as their most memorable day since they had been with us. I didn't mind, as the parents didn't seem to care, and it made me look like a bit of a hero for once!


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