By Friday afternoon, one of the children had a complaint.

We had told them this was a one-week summer scheme.

It had started on Monday.

It was now Friday.

That, he explained sternly, was only five days.

A week had seven.

Whether we liked it or not, he would therefore be back tomorrow for day six.

Fair enough.

For five days, 24 children aged between seven and eleven spent their mornings and afternoons playing, cooking, drawing, running around parks, making things, asking questions, ignoring some of the things we thought they might enjoy, and becoming completely absorbed in others.

On Monday, the two groups stayed in their own places.

The Holy Cross Boys group were at the school. The South City Hub group were in the Village.

There were toys, paint, crafts, hot lunches, and organised chaos.

At Holy Cross, the children made sausage rolls.

Later in the week, they all made potato and leek soup. Some of them hated it, so they made ham and cheese toasties instead.

That was more or less the philosophy of the week.

We had plans.

The children had opinions.

Reality got the deciding vote.

One of the original ideas was to give each child a book where they could record their answers to a different philosophical question each day.

What is kindness?

What is happiness?

Things like that.

On day one, several of the children made it fairly clear that they were much more interested in drawing in the books.

So they drew in them.

The questions still happened. Sometimes we asked for answers. Sometimes we followed up because something a child said made us curious.

There was never an exam at the end.

At Holy Cross, Kevin McArevey led one session on happiness.

Everyone sat in a circle.

One by one, the children named something that made them happy and took hold of a section of one long piece of yellow string.

By the end, the string had become a network expanded across the whole circle.

Then, one at a time, adults and kids lay underneath it.

The children lowered the web towards them while holding on to all the happiness they had just named.

Did they feel it?

Of course they did.

The lesson was simple: real happiness is not only something you possess. It is something you can give away.

Also roaming through Holy Cross was Kaizen.

Kaizen is a Shih Tzu crossed with a Bullmastiff.

A bull-shit.

He has extremely human eyes, is allowed to wander around as he pleases, and was adored by the children even when he was getting in the way.

His name means “ever evolving, ever growing, ever changing.”

We did not build the week around that idea.

But it stayed with us anyway.

On Wednesday, the children from the Village visited Holy Cross.

On Thursday, Holy Cross visited them.

On Friday, everyone went to Botanic Gardens for a scavenger hunt.

Originally, we had hoped to take the children to Ballycastle.

Funding meant we could not.

Botanic happened instead.

They had a brilliant time.

That became another quiet lesson of the week:

• The plan is not the thing

What happens is the thing.

Culture Factory got involved because this is exactly the kind of work we want to be around.

Not because we had a lesson we wanted to install into 24 children.

Not because we wanted them to emerge believing the right things.

We wanted to help make an encounter possible and then pay attention to what actually happened.

Sometimes that meant adults organising activities.

Sometimes it meant answering questions.

Sometimes it meant changing plans.

Sometimes it meant playing What’s the Time, Mr Wolf? with ten children until you were completely wrecked.

The children authored plenty of the week themselves.

They decided what they cared about.

They decided which activities landed.

They decided when a notebook was actually a sketchbook.

They decided who they wanted to play with.

And they did something else adults are often much worse at.

They just were.

We have a strange habit of looking at children and thinking they are becoming. We have become.

They are still figuring themselves out.

We are finished.

Their view of the world is still forming.

Ours is formed.

When you say that plainly, it is a fairly ridiculous thing to believe.

Nothing magical happened when we became adults that made us complete.

We are still changing, still learning, still getting things wrong, still being shaped by the people around us.

Children are simply less embarrassed about it.

That thought followed us into Friday evening.

After the children had gone home, we travelled to Ballycastle for a screening of Young Plato followed by a Q&A with Kevin.

The film takes children seriously enough to let them question the world around them.

Afterwards, I spoke briefly about the week and about why Culture Factory had wanted to be involved.

Not to explain what the children had learned.

More to explain what they had reminded us.

We spend a lot of time in Northern Ireland describing different communities, different backgrounds, and different inherited worlds.

For one week, we had children from Holy Cross and the Village in the same places.

We did not ask them to perform the significance of that. We did not spend the week telling them they were taking part in something “cross-community.”

They were children.

They played.

They cooked.

They argued.

They laughed.

They asked questions.

They chased a dog.

They went to the park.

They went home.

And perhaps one of the most useful things adults can occasionally do is stop insisting on telling children what something means before they have had the chance to experience it.

The scheme is over now.

The children took home tie-dyed T-shirts, drawings, memories, and, in at least one case, a firm belief that we still owe him two days.

We took home plenty too.

Mostly memories.

And a reminder.

They are still becoming.

And so are we.