Seeds of Doom

The story at Church Club on wednesday was the Parable of the Sower. For the last few years we’ve played a very satisfying game as part of this session. The floor of the school hall is scattered with seeds and the children are set the task of gathering as many as they can into a plastic beaker each. The beakers are then weighed to determine the winner of the game. Not that they actually win anything other than, as I am fond of warning them to general bemusement ‘a warm glow of self-satisfaction’ but that’s usually enough for six-year-olds. It is a very good game, in that it provides the maximum amount of child activity and occupation with the minimum amount of adult involvement. This week we even got to tidy up while the children were busy. Everyone gets what they want!

But, also this week, an unparalleled event took place: someone cheated at the game. When we came to the weighing-in at the end, John’s plastic cup was unfeasibly full, while a couple of his friends had nothing at all in theirs. ‘John said we should give him our seeds so that he would have more’, they complained. John’s denial of this seemed unconvincing given the unanimous testimony of the others and their completely empty cups, unfeasibly little to show for several minutes of fevered scrabbling on the floor. First place accordingly went to someone else, I’m afraid. Quite apart from John’s cheating it struck me as remarkable that the others went along with it as a perfectly reasonable proposal until after the fact when it struck them that giving him their seeds meant they didn’t have any. ‘we’ve all learned a lesson,’ said Anita who was helping. Yes, I thought, as well as an insight into child development, we now have to build anti-cheating measures into the games.