Last Friday I had the pleasure of spending the morning with Edzell’s primary seven class where we were discussing age-friendly communities and beginning to plan our inter-generational film project.

First we spent some time discussing a bit about the older generation and sharing perspectives:

Can older people ‘floss’?  (not the dental kind – it’s the latest craze apparently.  And the answer was yes, what with all that time to learn how…)

How many older people do we know in our communities?

We found out that most of the class knew between 1 and 3 older people but these tended to be either family members or next door neighbours.  We agreed that if we asked older people the same question – “how many younger people do you know?” – they might also only know family members and neighbours.  We wondered if this had changed from couple of generations ago and decided we’d like to see if we could change it in Edzell this year.

We then did some thinking on what the following phrases mean to us:

Age friendly – Rural Wisdom – Inter-generational…

After this we watched some examples of 2 inter-generational films and fed back our thoughts.  The group enjoyed the interactions between the young boy and the older man and felt that they had inspired each other.  The class agreed they were up for the challenge of creating their own film and inspiring some older people in Edzell (and being inspired in return!).

We are looking forward to meeting again in a few weeks when we’ll begin planning what we might include in our inter-generational film.  If you’re an older person in Edzell and would like to get involved please get in touch with Nicky at nicky@otbds.org