October 4th – 10th Highlights

Posted: 11th October 2021

We start todays blog off in Benthem, we have the wonderful Bentham Primary group who escaped to the outdoors as they enjoyed making room on the broom magic wands as a part of their CREST award. This is a new project and this was the first of many science focussed sessions that they will take part in. 

Our primary groups in Skipton were also busy with projects of their own as Smile Project got creative as they made birthday cards for a 94 year old lady who wrote to us in the summer. The children absolutely loved this project as they worked so hard to draw, paint, cut and stick in order to make colourful and beautiful cards for the lady. We always love to receive cards from our friends in nursing homes so that we can help to put a smile on their faces – especially when its their birthday! 

At SELFA Thrive, we had a visit from a special volunteer called Joel who brought goodies from his allotment. Joel taught the group all about the different types of veg that we can grow and the group evened a go at planting their own! Following the success of this session, the children were desperate to see Joel’s allotment and hopefully they will be able to go this week. 

Onto our youngest primary group and we have SELFA Starters! This amazing group were lucky enough to get out and enjoy what we believe might have been the last of the autumn sun. With nights drawing in and winter fast approaching it was lovely to see the children being able to play in the local park without worrying about keeping warm.

Community Champs started their own Walk With Amal activities this week to support #TheWalk project. The project is an international arts festival where a 3.5 metre-tall puppet of a 9 year old Syrian refugee child will walk 8000km across the European continent to shine a light on the stories of Millions of refugees. We started by understanding Amal’s journey and spoke about our homes and the similarities/differences to little Amal. We discussed how we could welcome her to our community. We’re pleased that we’ve been invited to one of the final events on 30th October to partake in the welcoming of Amal and join in the cultural event and see how we can take action to help. We are so proud of our group for having empathy and wanting to raise awareness of the refugee crisis.

Our fifth and final primary school group was Inspire who walked to Morrison’s cafe where they had a go at been more independent. Each child was given a small budget to order and purchase their own snack & drink. The group sat on tables with their friends and thought about how to keep safe when out by themselves in public. They talked about trusted adults and who they could turn to if they ever experienced any trouble. The group were mature and enjoyed doing things for themselves.

After all of the busy primary school sessions, we next delve into our calm SELFA Wellness group who spent the session checking in with their feelings. The group opened up about how their day was and how they were feeling in that moment. Following this, the girls were able to show off their incredible cooking skills as they made some salsa. This was so that they could have some tasty nachos as their snack for the session. We also had our first star of the week in this session as Teghan was set a challenge to compete a gratitude journal which included three good things that happened every day for a week. Teghan did exactly that and we are so proud of her for it!

One of our other youth groups was SELFA Engage who were treated to another forest school session with Rosie from The Yorkshire Dales Millenium Trust. This time, the group was busy building shelters to protect them from the horrible wind and rain. The group persevered wonderfully, defeating the weather conditions and were able to have fun with their friends. 

Our final youth group from last week was a small cohort who were fortunate enough to be able to go along to the Leeds First Direct Arena as they were invited to watch the Olympic Homecoming event for the Yorkshire Athletes that are a part of Team GB from Tokyo 2020. The afternoon was so inspiring and the group left with high aspiration levels thanks to Paralympian MBE Adam Duggleby who they had the chance to speak to. He even showed them his silver medal! 

 

Our Star of the Week Teghan