A cracking welcome

A couple of months ago, I was in a primary school staffroom, somewhere in the wilderness of the East Midlands, when I overheard a conversation between two teachers, about a five-year-old girl. The whole class had been colouring in pictures of badgers and, whereas everyone else had used black and white, this little girl had made her badger black and pink. They were trying to work out why – maybe she was going through a pink phase? I thought there was probably more to this, so during my next session I had a chat with the little girl. It turned out that the reason for her black and pink badger was that the only badgers she had ever seen had been run over!

Tapping into children’s experiences