Offord Primary School

Our youngest visitor was 6 months old and our oldest over 80! We invited all of our visitors to think fantastically about animal habitats, particularly bats and protected species, through a range of creative and community activities.

We saw a ‘Giant Wild Village’ grow all around Offord school playground and inside the school, ‘Ant Architecture’ stretched throughout the hall.  Trees and play equipment were adapted to accommodate wildlife such as hedgehogs and changed into the shape of pigs, inspired by ‘animal architectures’.  A huge bat appeared next to the orchard and bat facts sprang up around the playground.

People also gathered together and walked to St Peter’s Church, especially opened by Church Warden Liz Howard.  Bat expert Pat Howard (AKA Bat Man) and Gerard Smith, from the A14 team, worked alongside families to discover how to identify bats from their droppings, how bats catch their prey and to further explore the relationship between human and non-human habitats, in this amazing case with both protected species and protected buildings.

Going on the bat walk – we learnt lots of facts from the bat fact manNathaniel (6)

On Saturday these themes continued: exploring overnight motion-capture footage to see who the school shared their orchard with and the discovery of squirrels, hedgehogs, cats and muntjac deer; identifying, analysing and categorising bugs found in the Orchard with Bug enthusiast and local resident Gareth Rondell; listening to and drawing wildlife sounds normally inaudible to humans in the tent of sounds, recorded by bio-acoustic engineer William Seale and including a series of nocturnal bat sounds; the ‘Ant Architecture’ grew fantastically and Big Bug hotels sprang up in the ‘Giant Wild Village’.

An extraordinary 46 people set out on a second wildlife walk, tracking a freshly mown path across Millennium Green to All Saints Church, kindly opened by Reverend Jes Salt and Church Warden John Simpkin. There were more signs of bats in The Offords at the Church and everyone spotted wildlife along the way, shouting out discoveries to share them with the group; blackbird, wood pecker, jackdaw, damsel flies, dragon flies, swifts, meadow brown butterfly and large whites.

Look a cinnabar moth, they like Ragwort. Lolly (5)

The day culminated in the installation of new bat boxes in sites chosen in collaboration with children, teachers and on-site wildlife experts.

Over 24-hours residents and visitors found unfamiliar and exciting new habitats within a village they considered home. They found out through walking, talking, collecting and making fantastically, how the spaces they knew so well were also inhabited by other exciting beings of all species and types.

Please do it again next year. Sarah and Tom

(by Deb Wilenski) When we first went to look for signs of bats in All Saints Church we studied the outside of the building closely; the tower, the windows, the ways in for bats and other creatures.  On our second visit Benjamin’s granddad, John, who helps care for the church, met us at the door so we could come inside.  We walked up the grassy path to organ music playing softly and we remembered the whispering Barbastelle bats, a rare species found locally, who have found a way to lower their echolocation signals to avoid detection by their prey.  So quietly, whispering, we came into this beautiful little church to search for signs of animal occupation.

John showed us bat droppings, collecting on ledges and steps, and told us that the bats move around the church week by week, leaving these signs in different places.  The church had been recently cleaned but the children were still expert at spotting where the bats had been.  Jeremy asked how the bats could get in and John described how they squeeze through even the smallest gaps between rafters and tiles on the roof.

Looking up and around there were other wings in the church, flying company for bats.  Quiet carved forms no wider than the roof beams, the wings of WW2 pilots in insignia and aeroplanes, angels of course, and birds too.  So many corners to explore and significant objects to examine.   This was only the second time the class had been inside the church and so we invited them to look freely, see what they were drawn to and to record in observational sketches the details they liked most.  It was a peaceful and beautifully focused time of noticing, and recording.

In the afternoon we continued our bat research in different ways.  Some children drew bats using online searches for clear images as their inspiration.  A group of four children went to interview children and adults in other classes.  One group of boys show me how they could hang like bats and demonstrated physically how to be bats in the playground.  And a fourth surveyed the school grounds and orchard to photograph likely places for bat boxes.  They will take their suggestions to bat specialist Pat Howard who will be at the 24h Fantastical Bats event.

We have begun to combine our findings as collaborative researchers and artists. And will also continue to work in this way on our last whole day together, with children across the school taking part too. Here are some of the things the children found out from their school friends and teachers about bats:

They stay together and live in woods.
They are nocturnal so only come out at night.
Bats are the only flying mammal.
They can hear from a distance.
They are blind, noises bounce off them.
Baby bats are called pups.
Bats use echolocation to fly around so they don’t bump into things.
Bats are really popular.
Bats use their fur to make sounds.
Mrs Amner has a family of bats at her house.
They are not in the attic because it’s a new house and the eaves are sealed off.
She sees them most evenings around 9:20pm in the garden.
Bats need to be near water where they can catch mosquitos and moths
The water source could be a river or stream or pond, but also a water butt.
Bats poo lots (evidence in the church!).
They hang down from trees.
When they wake up they flap their wings to get the blood moving.
Their wings are like cloth.
They have pointy ‘elf’ ears.
They have strong backs.

So we explored three questions: who already shares our constructed environments with us?  How do animals build?  How could we build for animals?  We took our researches into the school grounds and orchard, to the Millennium Green and following a grassy path, to All Saints Church which has Long-Eared and Pipistrelle bats roosting in its structures.

The sharp- eyed surveyors in Wrens class found abundant evidence of animal occupation and building and began to ask questions: how do the bats get in and out of the church?  What would make a good bat tower?  We found a busy community of ants in the orchard who disappeared down their tunnels when a log was upturned. 

Some children built like ants in the afternoon – transporting pieces of white paper to form tunnels and cells, linking individual locations together to form communities.   Others built environments for bats with towers and bridges, tunnels to fly through and many ways in and out.

(by Deb Wilenski) Leading on from our first week’s exploration of legs and adaptations, we began to think about where legs go and how.  I shared some images from our previous Offord school project in which children had made different kinds of maps; a mouse map of the school orchard, an aerial view for a bird.  And when we arrived in the Millennium Green we split into small groups again to look for and record the different pathways, human and animal, which were visible or could be imagined.

From journeys we turned to settling.  Where could animals make their homes?  Were any already obvious?  What materials were available for construction?  Lolly spotted a mouse tunnel through nettles and told me it goes in through here and then round in a big circle and this is where it comes out.  Right inside is where they have their beds.

The green had been recently mown and heaps of cut grasses made brilliant nesting material.  A nest for a fat pigeon grew with each new handful of grass, was decorated and fresh green grass placed in its centre.  It occupied half the bench in the end, a new shared place of rest for pigeons and people together.

In the afternoon we introduced clay alongside the materials used in the morning and the children created intricate homes for animals.  A long roll of paper was used to represent a large road, coming right alongside the animal homes as the A14 does.  And each group found ways to cross or move home, by bridge, tower or pathway.

We continued this process of looking and recording in the afternoon focussing on ourselves as a species that has evolved to walk on two legs.  We compared human and animal legs of many kinds and tested our own legs to see what they could do.  And on a perfect sunny day with bare feet in the grass, the children worked in pairs, one acting as the ‘leg’ model, one as the ‘drawer’, to make observational drawings.

They finished the session by adding fantastical adaptations to their classmates’ legs on a tracing paper layer, interviewing their partner and drawing the powers and features they wanted to be given.

Thomas’ leg by Isla: fire, bullet gun, butterfly and magnetic force

Isla’s leg by Thomas: mazes inside, spikes, a candle – the red lines are full of trap doors

Images by CCI and Maciek Platek

Back in the classroom the children looked at images of fantastical bugs made by artists.  I showed them intricate glass sculptures by Emanuel Toffolo, creatures made from recycled metal by Dimitar Valchev and one of the oldest illustrations of woodlice in the world.

Woodlice from “The Book of Wonders of the Age” – 17^th or 18^th century manuscript

And then using clay or drawing the children invented fantastical bugs of their own, inspired by first-hand discoveries in the orchard, other artists’ work and each other’s imaginations. 

With these new creatures the tale of Old Mags continued before and after lunch; the torrential rain caused a flood in the bugs’ world and an exodus to a new land, crowds of bugs travelled together and when they finally arrived set up a new home, Old Mags joined them and drank her cup of tea!  The story was acted out through movement and developed though collaborative drawing and conversation.

Part of the bugs’ journey

At the end of the afternoon the children discovered how many legs they had between them and a fantastical 28-legged creature walked with great coordination back to its classroom.

Old Mags was going for a walk one day when her stick broke, then the fox tripped her over and she fell onto the ground.  She could hear the ants running.  (Maggie, who had explored Millenium Green as her nan)

Old Granny Mags is going to her house and she finds a baby on her doorstep.  A mouse comes in and frightens both of them.  Mags goes back into the woods but she forgets the baby by accident…the mouse runs off with the baby.  (Chelsea)

There’s an evil slug and snail.  (Harry)

A mutant slug. (Tom)

There are lots of thorns and they get stuck in the fox.  (Lucy)

There’s an evil tree, its roots come out and pull people underground.  (Lucas)

There’s this tree that looks evil but really it just wants to make friends.  (Joshua)

We managed to settle on a single narrative for the animation, with lots of side characters, and the children each took on a task; producing fantastical lettering for the title sequences, drawing Old Mags and the baby, making backdrops from materials gathered in the orchard, creating Old Mags’ house and the evil trees. 

And miraculously by the end of the day we had a first version of the film: Old Mags and the stolen baby.  As we quickly checked it before watching as a whole class, the children noticed places where the animated movement was too fast or words appeared too slowly, and the idea of editing and adding sound was suggested as a focus for the whole school Fantastical Friday to come in two weeks’ time.

From these detailed, accurate and adventurous observations we offered the invitation to journey into the realms of fantastical botany.  Plants began to grow and transform, secret powers were unleashed.  There were plants with teeth, electric flowers and a hybrid unicorn-mushroom species came into being.

And we discovered plant adventurers, as inspiration for our roles during the day: Maria Sibylle Merian who in the seventeenth century journeyed to from Holland to South America with her daughter to document the plant and insect life there; David Douglas who introduced to the UK plants including the lupin and Douglas Fir and died in 1835 pursuing his interests in the volcanic landscapes of Hawaii.

Our own botanical adventures began in the orchard.  Although I had been there many times before, seeing with the children’s ‘plant-hunter’ eyes revealed extraordinary new worlds. 

We’ve found tree’s blood, look it’s blood!  (Sophie)

It’s got little lines, you can see mini lines inside the other lines.  (Giuliano looking at a leaf)

Other leaves are cold and bendy but the magic leaf is smooth on top and warm.   (Ruby)

It doesn’t look furry but when you look at it here, it is.  (Emily looking at a leaf through the magnifying glass)

We found a tree like a giant deer’s leg, come and see!  (Gemma)

The children looked at ground level plants and fungi and climbed up into the trees, spending a long time exploring this new perspective; they discovered details of the tree they were in and saw other plants mapped out beneath them.

As they investigated the orchard the children were clearly thinking carefully about what they were seeing, asking questions and making field notes in their Magpie books:

Is it just made like that or is something guiding it?  (Jennifer, about the twisted tree)

How does the tree bark actually manage to stay on? (Gemma, looking at an old log)

How do mushrooms grow on wood?  They aren’t in soil.  I know, I’m going to write down what I can see and then next to it I’m going to write what I want to know.’  (Jennifer)

Joe B, looking closely at the birch tree branches

When we headed over to the Millenium Green and were led to the massive trees the children had talked about first thing in the morning, it began to feel like we really were plant adventurers entering new lands. 

The old willow trees were extraordinary markers of time; they had grown to a huge size and were now rotting down from the inside.  Jacob named one willow the wide and weak tree, and began a series of tree sketches and names in his Magpie book: the power tower tree or titan tree, the tree of trees, the porta-tree.

The willows led us to the water’s edge and the Island, a plant-filled land accessible only via fallen tree trunks.  Many children spent the rest of their time there, discovering seaweed, plants with thorns and spiky seed heads, bright berries still left where most leaves had fallen.  When it was time to leave it really felt like the adventure had only just begun.

But of course the children also reminded us what is important to them as children, and many of their drawings showed sound being used for contact and conversation, and as part of a story.  Arthur’s bat is calling to another bat; Laurie’s animals were calling for help to escape an erupting volcano; in Grace’s drawing two rabbits have an exchange in lines and circular symbols which she describes perfectly: One of the rabbits is talking and then he starts to eat his berries and the other is shocked by what he said.

Laurie: a volcano is erupting and the fox and rabbit are calling for help

Grace’s rabbits conversing in the moonlight

Sounds were part of ordinary life and adventures, conflicts and relationships; sounds had shape, colour and texture.  I was amazed by the children’s willingness and ability to explore this complex world of sounds which began by listening to just a few minutes of bat recordings. 

I collected a wish list of sounds from the children to share with William Seale.  At many points in the afternoon children came and added their thoughts about this, sometimes refining the exact sound they wanted to hear, sometimes voicing a question that had been occupying their minds as they were drawing: when William is making his recordings how does he know exactly what he is hearing?  How does he record things underground?  Can he record at the bottom of the sea?  And, brilliantly, What does William sound like?

In a wild exchange interview with William, coming soon, I will be asking these and many more questions about the real and fantastical aspects of his work.  I’ll be sharing his answers with the children when we meet again in March.

Gabriel’s under-sea soundscape with sea eruption, pelicans, puffer fish and a whale

And then I thought of William Seale’s sounds.  William is a bio-acoustic specialist, introduced to us by Cambridge Conservation Initiative.  He has spent years of his life recording the extraordinary sounds of the natural world: muslin moth caterpillar spinning underground silk cocoon, synchronised drumming of common wasps inside their paper nest.

And luckily, in the compilation William offered for us to play as a sound performance there are bat sounds.  Sequences of squeaks and clicks and buzzes, perfect for Batman and his friends.

We listened to these before heading out to the orchard and as the children put on their coats Emir showed me a brilliant discovery.  By scratching the Batman sign on the front of his costume he could make high-pitched noises that really sounded like bats.  Other children experimented with their voices and soon we were recording fox growls and spider voices as well as a widening repertoire of bat sounds.

Hawks class had left messages for the younger children: look in the east of the orchard, there is a fox den; can you find Thor’s hammer?; watch out for the tentacle tree; you can make a den out of these few trees,  it is an amazing place to hide.  As the children went searching, I invited them to use their superpowers too – to find clues of what might have happened in the orchard in the night.  Gabriel became fascinated by signs of moles.  Other children joined and listened intently for the sounds coming from underground.

After finding signs of animals and listening for their sounds, we invited the children to build something – as an invitation to the animals of the orchard and as experiments that could be left and checked the following week for signs of disturbance.  The children built with great inventiveness and were keen to record in their own voices what they were making and how it worked.

And we finished the morning by taking up Emily’s suggestion as teacher of this fantastic class – to make connections with the wider Offord community by imagining being other people exploring the Green.  The children adopted their roles with great commitment: they crawled as babies, or lay looking up at the sky; they moved slowly, bent over in old age, helped by walking sticks and younger friends; they travelled through the woods and clear spaces as ancient archers, skilled and alert; they followed and filmed the fantastical lives of a panda and magic horses as naturalist Steve Backshall and adventurer Bear Grylls.

As the children wrote in the afternoon about their different ways of exploring a great sense of empathy was clear. They really had discovered the green through another’s mind, body and emotions:

I explored the Millenium Green as a 83 year old grandma.  I pretended to not see very well.  I wrote a song about who I was:

Old Granny
Tired and old
She is so tired
She is so col-l-l-d
Swept up from the sea
She-e-e-e-e-e  is  me-e-e-e-e-e
(Sofia)

My adventures as a baby boy:
loads of new people
scary and friendly monsters (dogs)
is the world a bin? (public littering)
evil plants (stinging nettles)
spiky plants (thistles)
things that latch on to me
(Joshua)

I explored like a toddler then a grandad.  Most toddlers would try to eat the rabbit poo but at least the grandad would tell it ‘no!’  The toddlers in the world find the world through their mouth, so they would eat a stinging nettle, they would eat a leaf…or try and get the butterfly to eat.  Lots of people would say ‘no’ because butterflies are nature, not some nothingness animal.  They’re living nature!
(Ronnie)

The people we met on the Green also showed us how closely connected the Offord community can be – we bumped into Bridget’s dad out walking their dog who was very happy to meet us unexpectedly, and Dylan’s nan, who used to be Vice-Chair of the Millenium Green Trust.  She was a wonderful source of botanical information and had herself planted the pink tree some of the children had found earlier.

Our fantastical map in the making is now beginning to connect the Orchard and the Green, and the many relationships between people in both places.  With babies, grandparents, and old archers we are also bringing in the element of time. 

We reminded ourselves about the different maps we had seen made from words.  We also looked at some images of calligraphy and discovered our orchard fox amongst them in a sentence that contains all the letters in the alphabet.  Some children had been fascinated in our first week by the moth flight-path photographs.  A close up of a moth’s tongue, a spiral as Emily W noticed, reminded us of the decorative swirls in calligraphy too.  Maybe a letter or word was also a kind of map tracing the pen’s journey in ink.  Maybe if you were small enough you could travel round a moth’s tongue.

Archie’s re-writing of The quick brown fox was full of spirals.  Harry made a beautiful list of his favourite words for the orchard: sunlight, squirrel, fox den, footprint, bird wing.  Denzel wanted the base the children had built to be on the word map.  Ruairi wrote his words for the orchard in calligraphy made from wood, nails and weapons, a kind of writing that came from the guards’ play around the base.

We put all the children’s calligraphy together to form a word-map of the orchard above the gallery of objects.  And our first orchard hieroglyphs appeared too. 

Harry’s sentence reminded me of his deep interest in the fire when we cooked the ink: the fire burns to ash.  Emily F used the Egyptian letter system to spell out important orchard words; fire, warm, apple.  And Bridget developed new hieroglyphs for individual letters which recalled the patterns of lines we had found on logs, and which children had ‘printed’ using tracing paper and coloured pencils. 

We tested the ink for strength, taking a small sample from the bubbling pot.  It worked brilliantly and more and more of the children came to try it out.  Many spent the rest of the morning writing and drawing using feathers, sticks, brushes and the walnut ink.  Maggie said I feel like an old person writing in this ink, and Harry noticed the heat haze as he continued to watch the fire: It looks like sound waves.  The first mark he made with the new ink was a long undulating wave.

There were places to stop too; the fox den, the house a group of children built from logs, the benches where we had our gallery, significant climbing trees.  Sometimes the paths passed through these landmarks, on others one journey made the map.  Mathisha’s map reminded me of Paul Klee’s drawings of Tunisia – architectural lines that follow a single pathway, the surrounding areas left blank.

And there were journeys in time.  Night maps were made by fireflies and moths, intricate patterns traced in dark skies.  Mouse trail maps ran between day and night.  One of Oliver’s maps was almost invisible, made from repeated spiralling movements linked by the faintest of golden lines.  It looked like the flight map of night insects, but was drawn very lightly on white paper.

I remember Oliver in the orchard making his trails repeatedly and deliberately and his surprising trail making invention:

I was starting to make a trail.  Then I had a good idea to find this (piece of wood) and make a trail.  Then I had an even better idea to make this (string and handle) to pull things along.

Offord Primary School has a fantastic old orchard.  It’s big enough to feel like another world and small enough to find your way around.  It has open spaces, hidden places, shadows and sunlight, mature apple and walnut trees, new saplings growing. 

In this Fantastical Cambridgeshire project we will work with children right across the school.  Last week our adventures began with a wonderful class of seven, eight and nine year olds.

Before heading off to the orchard we talked about exploring; as ourselves – human beings, artists, scientists – and as other creatures.  How would you explore as the neighbouring cat who comes into the school grounds?  What if you were a beetle?  A bird?  A snake?  The children were quick to pick up the invitation to imagine many ways of moving and different ways of seeing.

We set up a wild gallery space using empty boxes and frames on the orchard picnic tables.  Right through the morning there was a beautiful balance between fast, energetic exploring and slower time building up the gallery, looking at finds and writing labels for them:

golden apples, it’s a magnet rock, a rock with stones stuck together, something you can eat with chocolate, a broken pot, a hollow rock, a rock with a centipede, a crocodile’s head, a leaf like a ladybird, the smoothest silkiest pebble…

There were sudden discoveries and urgent entreaties to ‘come and see’ – a fox house, a dead pigeon, a mysterious smooth patch on the ground.  The orchard fox went running through the children’s imaginations as they made traps and houses for it, hung apples in a net to entice it out, re-positioned the dead pigeon by the fox’s front door. 

In the afternoon we installed our orchard gallery in the school so other children and teachers could see our discoveries.  And we looked at maps of many kinds; word maps, a map of smells, flight paths, maps made by the movement of moths, mice and falling seeds. 

The orchard maps the children drew were fascinating.  Some were aerial views, others burrowed underground.  There was a snake’s eye view from a tree-trunk, and a flight map of fireflies.  Noah told me he had been ‘a bit creative’; as your eye travels over his double bird map you can soar upwards and see the whole orchard laid out beneath you, but some of the detail is seen from the ground, from a very different perspective.  It’s a fascinating map of flying and landing.