Our Pickwell children have the most wonderful school. It is just a mile away in our nearest village. We recently went to their harvest service in the village church and
Pickwell featured quite heavily. Rich and Liza were volunteered (well, forced in poor Richard's case) to make the word harvest, then jumble the letters around to spell lots of different words that harvest encapsulates, like 'starve' and 'share' for example. Then the whole school sang a song which included a verse our Molly had written about vegetables- brilliant!
Another thing they do is when the children go in to year 4, they go along to the village 'community tea' after school. Here, they share what they are doing at school to the more elderly folk of the community.
I went along as it was Zac's first time and oh my goodness it was so moving! You could really see how much it meant to the men and women at the tea. The children were amazing too, each taking it in turn to read something they had written. We love stuff like this.
They also had a luchtime last week where all the parents were invited to come in and eat with their children and play in the playground with them afterwards.
Then a letter came home that on Zac's birthday (and it was also Zac's friend, Teddy's birthday too) they were taking the top half of the school to the beach for the day as part of their pirate topic. We agreed with them that they could make a shortcut through our grounds.
This is when we hatched a plan. We rallied together as many parents as possible and began to plan our ambush! Well, it was Zac's birthday and we thought it would be good to give him something he wouldn't forget...
Steve waited by the start of the drive and hid behind a stone pillar. We could hear the screams from where we were hiding at the far end in the woods!
Frankly, i'd be running in the opposite direction if this face leapt out at me.
We ran between the trees as they approached and then Richard grabbed the headmaster and after throwing him over his shoulder, we tied him to a gate.
We made the headmaster (this is not the headmaster btw!) answer three pirate jokes if he wanted to be freed. Sadly we didn't get much support on this from the kids, until the wise and cunning man, fessed up that he had a rucksack full of gold chocolate coins which they would only receive if we let him go!
On their way back through they stopped to drop Zac and Molly off, they sang 'happy birthday' and we handed out cakes (made by Teddy's mum) and sweets to give them the energy to get them back to school.
Zac said that it had been his best birthday ever and that was due, in part, to his brilliant presents.
I asked him to take them to his room because if he left them on the table, the builders might play with them. After he had left for school, i found this..
On the evening of Zac's birthday we had our usual Pickwell Friday Tea with the Elliotts (and Martin our joiner friend who works out of one of our garages) and afterwards the girls produced a special birthday show.
A great birthday for a wonderful 9 year old boy x
