August 2nd-8th Highlights

Posted: 10th August 2021

Welcome back to your favourite weekly blog! This time, we will be showing you all of the wonderful things that SELFA had to offer in the second week of the summer holidays. The weather was up and down all week but our sessions were still super fun. The summer holidays are now in full swing and we are having a blast!

Up first, we have Girls Rock who stepped away from their DJ workshops in order to have a session on mental health. The girls know how important looking after our mental health is and so, they took the opportunity to think about it in more depth by storm. Although there was know DJing this week, DJ NikNak still came in to lead the session. She allowed the girl’s creativity to run wild as she led an arts-based workshop where the girls communicated their thoughts on mental health through art before closing the session with a mental health quiz. Between the mental health activities, Girls Rock were visited by our healthy food coordinator who showed them how to make smoothies. For many of the girls, this was a new healthy food for them to try and they never realised the positive impact that healthy foods can have on us feeling good, inside and out.

This was not the only session with new foods being tried. Over at SELFA Youth, the group set out on a walk around Malham as they walked to Janet’s Foss as they teamed up with the Yorkshire Dales Millenium Trust. Once they had arrived at their location, the group sat down and enjoyed a picnic together. Our Healthy Food Coordinator, Nichola had packed them up lots of treats as they got to try Apricots, celery, spring onion and hummus which went down a treat with many of the young people trying these foods for the first time. Following the picnic, the group took part in some scrambling before finishing off the session with a lovely ice cream which they got to enjoy together. 

One of our main highlights of last week was from our SEND sessions who have been working so hard on their puppet play. Over the past few weeks, our stay and play sessions have been working hard to make puppets and lanterns ready for a puppet show. The SELFA children had an amazing time with their families as they enjoyed the interactive puppet show at Skipton Town Hall. The group were also supposed to go on a picnic in the woods last Friday but due to the weather, plans quickly changed and we decided to bring the outdoors into SELFA. Our sports hall became a wonderful forest, filled with animals and music. Our families had the most magical time and it produced our first star of the week, Hughie. Hughie tried to get involved with absolutely everything that was on offer and showed us his incredible dance moves!

Our North Craven Primary group went crazy with science experiments in their session last week. Starting off with some calligraphy practice, the group produced some incredible designs which they were super proud of. The group then went into some volcano experiments which were an absolute blast as all of the children followed all of the instructions expertly well to ensure success. Their third and final experiment was flying aeroplanes using an air pump, the group had a great bit of healthy competition as they saw who could fly it the furthest. This group produced another star of as our newcomer, Tanaia got stuck in to all of the activities and showed great enthusiasm. Welcome to SELFA! 

Our Skipton Primary Groups got to enjoy a whole host of activities with our 4-7’s groups going to the Skipton fire station. The group got to see how the firemen work and they even got to try some of the jobs themselves – their favourite was firing the water hose which put a huge smile on every child’s face. Our 8-11’s were trying something new every day! One group enjoyed making flower bags with Nichola, another did some chromatography and one group did marshmallow slingshots. It wasn’t all arts and crafts though, we had a special visit from HART animals who even brought a llama and our final primary group got on a train as they learnt all about travelling on the train. We have been supported so well by other organisations this past week. Keep an eye out on our social media channels to find out more about how we have been helped. 

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Our stars of the week, Tanaia and Hughie