Digger at Book Character Day.

I was excited to read ‘The Digger that Did’ at St David’s Marist College, Inanda, Sandton, on April 03, 2023. In fact, I was delighted when Debbie Buchner, the librarian, asked me to be the first event in Book Character Day, because I really wanted to know how boys would respond to the story. Up to then, I had read the story at girls’ schools only. In South Africa, many of the private (UK ‘public’) schools are girls-only or boys-only.
It was an early start, to be at St David’s by 08.15 and I had to allow time to negotiate traffic under load-shedding – which means traffic lights out of action. I first started teaching at St David’s brother school, Sacred Heart Marist College in Observatory. The Marist schools are Catholic schools and St David’s, like Sacred Heart, has a beautiful chapel, where the boys, Grade 1 to Grade 3, were seated after Mass. Debbie Buchner, dressed as Little Miss Happy, met me outside. One of the teachers kindly operated the data-projector for me, leaving me free to concentrate on the very interactive audience.
The boys were dressed as an amazing range of book characters, with many superheroes also getting in on the act. They were absolutely rivetted by the background story and did a marvellous job of acting out later, when I got to reading the book. Their questions were interestingly technical: how the Evergiven could be moved off course, how anything that big could float, how the Suez Canal could be dug, before big diggers were invented? It was really important to them that Digger was based on a true event, that could be researched on Google and I know many of them would go home to do just that. They were a most impressive and articulate group of boys.

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