As per my previous post today was Mission:Explore ME0019 Day. The Mission Team, AKA the kids and me, trawled up and down the High Street of a local town searching out the letters a-z.

A to….

The mission was 96% successful, which is pretty good. We competely failed to find a “y”! Plenty on pub signs, number plates and house names but we decided that taking a letter from the middle of a word or number plate was cheating. Having said that we did cheat, taking the “u” from the Rising Sun pub sign.

We only had one moment where we had to explain ourselves - a woman opened her front door as we were using her front step to provide a little extra height to get our “c” picture. She didn’t seem to mind and seemed pretty interested when Boy Wonder described the mission.

All 26 of our photos (that’s 25 letters and one Mission Team photo) can be found here; http://www.flickr.com/photos/little_wide_world/sets/72157624559863230/

Today’s challenge for the kids:

Collect 26 photos of the letters a-z in different places. (Full details of the mission can be found in Mission:Explore by the Geography Collective.)

Prepare for two over excited children with cameras tearing up and down the High Street.

A post of our mission, with our pictures, will be made later today.

Another drab Sunday so another consult with Mission:Explore from the Geography Collective and mission number #ME0016 was selected.

“You are now a dog.

Let a dog take you for a walk and then think about how you sensed the world differently.”

We put our trusty hound, Harri, on a long lead and followed where her nose took us. Harriett is very much creature of habit and took us on one of her regular walks.

(If she excapes from the garden she doesn’t go anywhere near this route so it must be a habit induced by the wearing of a lead.)

She led us through the village, past the church and down on to farmland where she knows she can get off the lead and have a good run, and maybe chase a rabbit or two.

Walking through the village and Boy Wonder was watching the dog, sniffing what she was sniffing…

(That’s a leaf not a dog bomb.)

Viewing the world from doggy-height…

Sticking his head into holes that the dog had stuck her head into…

And listening out for the sounds we think the dog might be intersted in. On a fairly typical Sunday in the village we could hear planes overhead (no ash-cloud this weekend!), birds and shooting. As we walked down into the fields the shooting became louder and the dog was clearly excited by the noise, running back and forth and joining in with the occassional barks coming from the shooting party dogs.

Usually the walks are a chance to catch up with what has happened over the school week, general chit-chat and watch the red kites overhead. Being a dog for an hour brought the focus back down to earth, even in the earth occassionally.

Boy Wonder would have taken his new dog status further but I drew the line at letting him get in the drainage ditch with the dog - she smelt bad enough, I didn’t need him stinking us out as well!

ME0016a isn’t getting much enthusiasm from Boy Wonder - draw the dog that took you for a walk. I’ll wait until it’s too wet to go out and see if I can get him drawing.

With two missions complete we are really enjoying using Mission:Explore to give our weekends a slightly different focus (Mission:Explore by The Geography Collective is available from Amazon). “Let’s go on a Mission” gets a much more positive response than “Let’s walk the dog” and once Small has recovered from Chicken Pox our mission team will be back up to three.

The Geography Collective are Guerrilla Geographers - their recent publication, Mission:Explore, is a book full of challenges to get kids (and adults) exploring their environment and questioning the world. A collection of 102 missions - there are some simple things to get you thinking about where you live (ME0052: sketch the view from a window) and some more challenging missions to get you thinking (ME0008: spend a day without turning anything on).

Interesting, I thought, so set about getting hold of a copy - although it’s available at Waterstones our local branch didn’t have any copies but it is currently available at Amazon for £4.99 (RRP £7.99) and my copy arrived yesterday morning.

Having flicked through Mission:Explore with my kids (aged 4 and 8) I could see that the enthusiasm of the authors had come through in the bright illustrated pages. Both kids found pages that interested them and we have decided that we are going to complete as many “missions” as we can.

This morning we completed our first mission!

Mission ME0072 - well, starting with ME0001 would be too straight forward. Our challenge was to “take photographs of your local area to make it look like a ghost town”. On a Sunday morning in our sleepy village I think “find a dozen people” would have been more challenging!

The kids and I, each armed with a camera set out to explore the village. The obvious starting point (somebody had mentioned ghosts) was the churchyard. We then followed the High Street to the village square and took photos through the windows of the closed shops. We felt like spies peering through the windows and snapping the counter of the shut Chippy.

The kids kept forgetting about the misison, being distracted by the sound of the church congregation singing, wanting to look for tractor parts on the local farm and discovering that the NT property in the village does open sometimes. Then the call of the village shop became too great and we headed home with packets of Smarties in hand.

We uploaded our photos and rather heavy handedly photoshopped on some sepia, b&w and antiqued effects to put together an album of pictures with not a soul in sight.

The end results aren’t terribly eery or ghostly but all in all it was a fun way to spend a grey Sunday morning.

Our full album can be found on Flickr; http://www.flickr.com/photos/little_wide_world/sets/72157623974293876/

Expect more mission stories soon.

The Geography Collective are on twitter - @geocollective.