It was a Monday. Just a normal school morning. Drop the bags on the ground and then wait for the bell to ring and pick them up again. Stand in the line and wait for the teacher to come out and bring us inside the building. As I said before, just a normal, typical Monday morning.

I glanced across the yard watching the organised teachers collect their tired, yawning pupils from their line and saunter  into the school. Class after class after class, teacher after teacher. Just our daily morning routine. I froze while watching the last class go inside. Ms. O’Meara was out? 

No, that couldn’t have been true. Just then the principal, Mr. Moore, told us to walk quietly inside and we noticed  that there was a sheet on our classroom door. Half of the children would be dispersed into Mr. Kelly’s class and the rest would be in Ms. Fitzpatrick’s class. We slammed our bags on the ground and then waited eagerly for Mr. Moore to split us up. He gave us our rooms and then, as we were picking up our bags he told Ms. Fitzpatrick’s group, which was my group, to leave our bags there and collect them after our visit to the kite workshop. We all looked at each other with enthusiasm and read our minds. “Yes!!!”

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After a nice short walk to UL we had reached our destination. It was a big room with lots of tables with lovely sea-themed covers on them. In front of each chair was a kite, a handle with string and three plastic sticks. There were also pictures of astronauts, stars, moons and rockets along  with some colours.

We were told not to touch anything and to sit. We then got a brief talk about what we would be doing. The kind men were showing us interesting things such as clips of the moon landing on the 16th July 1969. They also quizzed us: what were the names of the three men who went to space? (Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins) What does NASA stand for? (National Aeronautics and Space Administration).

We even got to smell some moon dust and water: disgusting, in my view. After all the excitement we were told to take one of the sheets in front of us and place it under the kite. We then had around 5-10 minutes to trace and decorate with the colours. After everyone finished the interesting task  we were given step by step instructions on how to construct the kite. It took us a while but we had great fun. We were then photographed with our kites and some of us even got to fly them. 

We had a wonderful time but sadly we had to leave as the session had come to an end. We walked back to school and chattered about how the day went and although we traced some of the same pictures on to our kites they were all unique in their own way.