A Time Capsule
The children have all now returned to school following the last lockdown; it is great to see them back with their friends and teachers and fantastic to hear that all are happy.
The children have experienced an extremely strange year of education with some of the children not seeing their friends for months, or only seeing them via online Zoom or Teams meetings, other children have been attending school, but it has felt very different with much smaller class sizes and ‘bubbles’ of children always being kept separate from the other year groups. Some children have experienced a bit of both with a combination of home learning and face to face teaching.
The teachers have done a wonderful job of reintegrating the children back into school, and it’s great to see how happy they all are to be back, but it still feels like school is a little fragmented due to the ‘bubbles’ groups that have to remain in place for the time being as the vaccines programme is rolled out. I wanted to try and come up with different ways that the children could remember this strange year and collectively work on a project to feel as though they were back together as a whole school even if they are still physically separated by the bubble rules. My idea was to produce a time capsule so the children could record their experiences for future children to read.
The children really liked the idea of burying a time capsule on the school grounds and agreed that they wanted the reception children to bury it and for these same children to then dig it up six years later in 2027 when they reach Year 6 and their final year of primary school. They liked the idea of these children having a distant memory of burying the time capsule ‘way back’ in 2021 and then having the excitement of digging it up again, seeing their contribution whether written or drawn and also potentially seeing work their older brothers and sisters had completed whilst at the school too.
The work the children completed for this was fantastic with some writing very personal letters to their future selves offering good life advice and of hopes of achieving their career goals, examples of which were being a policeman, a dancer, an astronomer, a high court judge and an artist. Some children wrote letters of thanks to NHS staff and emergency service personnel who have kept the country safe during these long arduous months, some wrote about what home schooling had been like and most commented on how much they had missed their friends. Some of the younger children drew pictures of superhero key workers. All of this was placed in the time capsule and buried in the forest school area by the reception class children with the rest of the school watching a live stream of it from their classrooms. Soon a plaque will be placed where the capsule is buried with instructions on when to dig it up and by whom.