Activity Day: Didn't we have a lovely time....

 The dust is settling and we are definitely in the endgame now! Just waiting for the drain saga to resolve and then we are off and running with our amazing new facilities and (largely) waterproof roof. How exciting and what a reward for 5 years of slog, anxiety and stress. The Lottery Bid team are lying down with an aspirin.

So where do we go now? The Summer Festival is well on its way and there is much to look forward to, but to kick off we held an activity fun day for the year 6 pupils at one of our local schools. And what a day it was: the sun shined as we opened the doors to about 50-60 young people and their teachers. 5 special activities were planned: gardening, bellringing, stonemasoning (if that's a word), paper sculpture and playing the organ.

The garden teams joined our Wisbech in Bloom colleagues and planted and weeded and turned the patch of ground around the boat into a beach. Amazing how fascinating a bucket of seashells are to people who rarely get the chance to go to the beach.

Planting heucheras in the shady bit
  
 
Although there were a lot of reservation about getting their hands dirty      in the soil, they all got stuck in and did a great job in planting up the        empty beds





Watching the experts at work



They then moved on up the narrow and scary stairs to the bell tower to try their hands at chiming the bell and ringing handbells (harder then it looks!)




Handbell action

   Even their teachers turned out the be expert bell ringers




Then onto the organ, where there was an opportunity to blow down an actual pipe to check whether the bigger the pipe the deeper the sound. Val played the Harry Potter theme on the organ which completed setting the scene of the church as a Hogwarts set (very well suited to the role).

Spare organ pipes

     










Rapt attention!






There was even time to spend some time with Steve the Stonemason with an opportunity to recruit some young people to the idea of becoming an apprentice stonemason (the heritage restoration industry desperately needs new recruits and Steve is about to go  into our local school to give a careers talk.)

Lime plaster gets HOT!

The kids learnt about mixing the special lime plaster that has to be used in such an ancient building.




And then they got to have a go and a bit of carving.



Finally they turned to some quiet time making paper angels in the paper sculpture session.


They got the chance to take home something to show for their amazing day out. The volunteers waved them goodbye and then had a well-earned cup of tea and a sit down. What a great bunch of kids: hopefully we now have a lot of budding gardeners, stonemasons and organists here in Wisbech!


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