Every year Sarah spends her Easter holidays helping us with lambing ( see our previous post) and when she goes back to school takes some of our orphan lambs into the primary school where she teaches. This year she took it one step further and took her reception class to visit Whitehouse Farm in Oxborough (see #OFS14 blog for more about owners Nick & Susie Emmett). Below she has jotted some thoughts about how she has used her shepherding experience to teach her class this spring.
'And now on to children …
Who was it said that, no one should
ever work with children or animals? … well I’ve done both. And the best
recipe is to mix them up together!
Oh,
this sounds like my great grandfather who mixed baking and farming.
I’ve always taken lambs into school, yet I
don’t think I’ve ever had a reception class so captivated as this year's have been.
The lamb visit to school motivated the
children to write, paint, role-play, sing and be very curious. One boy went to the shops and bought a book
about sheep, another girl scraped the
bark outside our classroom with her feet saying “I’m digging
the ground like the sheep”. I was really
surprised by this, we’d not talked about this behaviour and her reaction was entirely based on her
observations at Whitehouse Farm. For this particular girl it represented some
significant language development.
One day we made a sheep pen in the classroom. It was full of noisy children pretending to be sheep trying to find their muddled up lambs. It was a lot of fun and pretty amazing when you think that a lot of the children in my class, live in challenging social conditions, and rarely go anywhere. A trip to the farm was a big deal for them.
Another day we visited a pop-up art gallery in our classroom created with pictures borrowed from my walls at home. We’ve
looked at what crooks are made of, made lamb shaped biscuits and are shortly to
explore meat and wool. The children were
so enthralled with all their newly gained language that they told Nick & Susie on a subsequent visit to Whitehouse Farm that the big sheep are called ewes, not
mummy sheep!
A huge belated thanks to Rob and Sarah for allowing me to
spend an idyllic Easter holidays helping out; even entrusting me to the care of
the orphans – all hand picked to be of special interest so that the children
could discuss a variety of sizes and colours, and mixed parentage.
My Head Teacher couldn’t believe I was brave enough to back my
van up to the gates and just let 6 lambs go across the playground
and through a funnel made up of lines of children into a temporary pen. Each child had to weigh and make up their own
milk powder to feed a lamb. An exercise
in logistics enabling 30 children to do this.
Normally noisy children learned to be gentle and careful. '
The logistics of getting photos to accompany this amazing story have proven a little too difficult to do. I am sure however that you can get the gist without them. I hope that the children at Sarah's school in future years will look back at these few weeks and realise how privileged they were to have her as a teacher.
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