After a long (and necessary) summer break, our first week of the sessions brought some very unexpected news as we were informed of a big change in our research projects. We would now be doing our research projects as parts contributing to a whole paper rather than self-contained reports. Initially, I was quite sceptical of the change as it seemed like a mammoth task, and I was worried about how we would adapt our previous plan to the new project. Still, I felt relieved by the academic support we received from our supervisors, who broke the project down into more sizeable chunks. Equally, there was an air of excitement as our projects would contribute to something greater and have a wider impact on the local community. 

Our first two weeks have been full of rain and cold days, but the positive spirit of the groups has never been dampened (no pun intended); working in a group setting is refreshing compared to the individual and sometimes lonesome work we usually do for university. And despite the rain pouring down on our team trip to the St. Giles fair, we still managed to go on the rides and enjoy ourselves! 

Going into our first session with the school children, I had little expectations, knowing that every class and every school is different. My first impression of the school was very nostalgic and reminded me of what it was like to be in school, which feels like such a long time ago. As the pupils came into the classroom, I was initially quite nervous, and I could sense the same from them, but what I really enjoyed was working in smaller groups when we did our discussion part of the session. I felt much more confident leading the discussion with a smaller group and equally found they were opening up as well, especially since they had chosen their own groups, and so were with people they felt comfortable with. 

One of my favourite parts of the day was hearing the pupils’ interests and perspectives about things and how creatively each group responded to our prompt questions of ‘What is a story?’, ‘What are your favourite stories?’ and ‘Why are stories important?’. I found myself surprised by how much we had in common like books of shows we had watched and enjoyed. When challenged or questioned further about their answers, they also came up with creative answers to link their interests back to the questions at hand. 

One key skill I took away from our session was the need to be adaptable. Since we spent longer on our introduction and warm-up activities than we anticipated, we had less time in the session for other things we had planned, so we had to cut them out. However, we thought it was more important for the session for us to build rapport with the students and for them to open up to us. 

I am looking forward to meeting our second primary school group next week and continuing our sessions with our first!