Earlier this term, our Year 8s to began planning the Gr8 Play D8.
All the Year 8s, in groups of five, were charged by Mr Cousens with creating, preparing and delivering an enriching activity workshop for a small group of Year 4 pupils.
The Gr8 Play D8 is one of our leadership programmes run by Mr Cousens. It is designed to give our Year 8 pupils the opportunity to develop their leadership and HPL skills. All of the Year 8 groups are project managed by one of our prefects or Patrol Leaders. This is a great opportunity for them to gain leadership skills, not only by coordinating the Year 4 pupils, but also discovering how to be a strong leader in managing their own Year 8 friends, who may have very different opinions and suggestions. Meanwhile our Year 4 pupils benefit from spending time with our most senior pupils and getting to know them them as reliable, fun and inspiring role models.
The Year 8s were given time to prepare and design the workshops, before delivering the workshop over two consecutive breaktimes to two different groups of Year 4 pupils. In between each workshop, they analysed the workshop, discussing what had happened, what could be improved upon and making changes in time for their second delivery.
The Year 8s' workshop ideas were wide-ranging: garden party, nerf battle, dance lesson, cricket session, festival fiesta experience, water polo, forest school session, hide and seek in the woods and biscuit decorating. The Year 8s resourced and planned every element and worked hard to ensure the Year 4s had a great time.
Our project leaders had the opportunity to discover the art of good leadership: to ensure they listen to everyone’s thoughts, but ultimately to be decisive and confident in the direction they believe will work.
MR COUSENS
Touring around watching the groups on the first day, I could see it was actually very productive for elements to go wrong. The Year 8s had to think rapidly, find solutions to unexpected problems and this did wonders for their HPL Agile skills. For some groups who encountered problems, the Year 8 pupils knew the Year 4s enjoyment of the morning would entirely hinge on them maturely and intelligently strategising on their feet.
Mr Cousens
There were a lot of happy Year 4 customers after session one, however, as Mr Cousens and his team surveyed the second workshop, they could see that many improvements had been implemented.
I was impressed with a group running a Festival Fiesta Experience. In their evaluation after the first day, they recognised that a popular element from their first session was general dancing to their music. For their repeat activity, they assigned a Year 8 pupil to teach fun choreography, knowing this would go down well!
Mr Cousens
Key HPL skills:
Analysing: making sense of information, thinking logically, finding the right approach
Agile: being open-minded and thinking around a problem to explore different paths
