Weaving with willow

No - his name isn't Willow. That would be silly!

James and I went into school for an hour today, so that I could dump some paperwork, pick up some more coursework to mark and do a couple of other little jobs.

Got there to find out that we have been broken into twice over the holidays. Really irritates me. F***ing morons.

That aside, we took a wander down to an area called the Quad...which is basically a pointless empty outdoor space between 4 different classrooms in the school.

This week it is being transformed into a quiet garden space for children and staff to work on and tend to. This is part of a project linked to targetted mental health programmes in school. There are genuinely a frightening number of youngsters, not just in our school, but nationwide, who for a number of reasons, have genuine mental health issues. We are fortunate that we have a full time counsellor who works in our school, with children and with staff should they want it (I have taken her up on the offer a couple of times!). She is fantastic and organises so many activities for the children to help with their confidence, self esteem, ability to relate to other children and adults, and their ability to cope in difficult situations and manage anger and stress appropriately (and not just the way that they have witnessed in the childhood environments outside of school).

So the Quad has become a garden, with a lovely pergola, some beautifully constructed flower boxes and vegetable boxes too, benches etc. When I turned up, there was a lovely scene, with staff, kids, parents and employees from Groundworks who had been involved in the design and implementation of the project. Really nice to witness. (Any veggies that are grown will be used in the school canteen!)

The area will also be used for parents meetings / community meetings too when the weather is fine - a bit less of a threatening environment for the kids to meet in when they have their different sessions, and gives them something to take responsibility for, that frankly, they wouldn't otherwise be able to do.

I'll post some of the other pictures to Flickr later, and some more next week when I get some nice photos when its completed.

Makes you feel good about things when nice stuff can happen for kids that the rest of the world would happily write off.

Off to mark more coursework.

Thank you for everyone's good wishes yesterday - still not 100% but food is staying in now, so thats progress.