How do you find it, those of you that are teaching kids to ring? In some ways it is refreshingly easy – no need for hours of explanation, just off you go. In fact some moments of teaching handling to one or other of the 7 kids we recruited a year ago from the next door primary school at Swaffham Bulbeck (Cambs) felt like teaching a deaf blind person. Nothing you said or demonstrated had gone in – you just had to pull off and cope with the next 5 or 6 strokes, and by then they’d got the idea. Very different from teaching handling to adults. And kids just stop what they’re doing if they want to scratch their nose or hitch their trousers up. Keeps you on your toes!

The 7 kids quickly went down to 5 and there more or less we stayed. In fact we’ve now gained a younger sister, and the sister’s friend.

Challenges:

• How to teach handling to that many kids at the same time and find enough teachers locally to help me.
• How to keep the existing band on board with what you’re doing – not everyone likes having kids around – the tendency is to turn up later and later; plus the usual focus on learning Surprise Major gets diluted.
• How to get kids to turn up on Sundays when their parents don’t really want to get up early/leave their other kids, and the child learner is too young to transport themselves to the tower. In fact any sort of trip out is difficult because of the transport problem.

Joys:

• More noise and bustle in the tower – some of us do like it! There’s a lot of joking around and funny drawings and messages on the white board
• Achievements, certificates, sweets for prizes
• Getting more home tower ringers on a Sunday (occasionally) and getting some nice sounding ringing (occasionally)

Recruitment meant a meeting with the Head where things like a structured Learning the Ropes syllabus, certificates, accredited teachers counted for a lot. She was willing to try anything which might enrich her kids’ later lives. Our taster afternoon for the whole class was a mammoth effort of organisation and achievement with loads of helpers needed. Then teaching handling was a whirl of activity, with help generously given by other ART Accredited teachers plus calm locals who learned a lot following what we were doing (and some of whom later went on ART Training Scheme Day Courses themselves – hurrah!).

Now I’m finding it a different and indeed a greater challenge – how to keep the kids hooked and motivated when the achievements are a lot harder to come by? It seems a big jump between LtR Levels 2 and 3, and I think it feels to them as though they’re stagnating a bit. Giving them all quality rope time at this stage of learning to plain hunt is hard – one at a time, whilst the other 6 kids get noisier and noisier as they sit out.

Future goals need to be something that enthuses the parents as much as the kids, as I really need to have the parents on board as much as the kids themselves. You are dependent on the parents to enable their child’s participation. I’d be pleased to hear about other people’s experiences of how to make this situation work!