St George's Year 8 Step Day

We had a fantastic day last Tuesday at St George’s School with the awesome year 8 students. The theme of the day was Positive Peer Relationships and we covered a whole range of topics including forgiveness, prejudice, friendship languages, animal responses and God’s design for our lives and friendships.

The morning went really well with lessons on forgiveness and prejudice. There were lots of great comments from the students who were obviously thinking very deeply about these big topics. The students had a well earned rest and then we played some group games led by Mike Palin from the 267 project. The atmosphere was amazing and full of fun, laughter and a very healthy dose of competition. I think this was probably a highlight for the students and staff alike.

After this we had some presentations from Jez and the team and then we broke off into smaller groups that were facilitated by some of the sixth form students, who we trained and prepared the week before. Our first presentation was about friendship languages (aka love languages) and the students ran a quiz to see which one most impacts them. The students enjoyed discovering how they most feel loved. We encouraged them to find out how they can make their friends and family feel loved. The next presentation was about animal instincts. This was adapted from the session that we run with sixth formers in the Leadership Foundations course. We taught the children about the different animal responses and showed them that we may lean to one of the responses naturally but that sometimes we may need to choose a different response depending on the situation that life throws at us. It was fun to see the students recognising themselves in some of the animal descriptions.

The day was concluded with a final assembly led by the wonderful Jez that spoke of how God has designed us to be full of goodness and gave the students a challenge to see if year 8 can be known as a year that encourages and lifts each other up.

What stuck out for me from the day was that in each session the students were able to hear some golden nuggets about God’s heart towards them. I was also reminded of how amazing the volunteers are giving of their time and energy and that this really does make a difference in the lives of the students.

Steph :)