Here are a couple of contributions from the "Thankful" activity which has many pupils saying how much it's helped them to appreciate the people around them.
Today we had more visitors to Sanctum and we were very grateful for their presence and help, especially at break time when a boisterous group of girls rather dominated the atmosphere.
Andrea Dalton works in schools in Maldon, though we first met up through a consultation day organised by schoolswork.co.uk in Luton! Andrea came to see Sanctum in action and, being a natural schoolsworker, quickly got involved.
Karen Hodges is the SU Schools Development Worker for the East Region and made the trip all the way from Leicester to join us for the day. Karen is doing some networking and research into the area of pupils and prayer in both the primary and secondary sector and runs a prayer club in one of her local schools. I'm grateful for Karen's reflections on the day and for the way she helped out.
Today's lessons went well. Even the big class of 32 managed to make the most of their time with us, in spite of there being too few activities (only 12!) to keep everyone engaged at once. This is where having a skilled team really helped - they were able to initiate short discussions with pupils waiting for an activity to become available all of which increases the relational aspect of what we're doing. At the end of one class with only 15 pupils we were able to divide them into two groups and sat each one around an activity for a follow up discussion. This is such a privilege as it makes for a much more natural conversation.
With the previous two sports days over we had about 30 through at lunchtime. After the distracting level of busyness at break we prayed that the room would be a place of God's peaceful presence, so perhaps it's no surprise that at lunchtime there was a wonderful peace about the room and quite a few young people came in who have not previously been to Sanctum.
In each school we go to there emerges an unexpected trend, a characteristic that makes each Sanctum unique to the school. Here we've noticed that for the "Sorry" activity pupils are drawing round the feint "sorry" printed on the response slips. The content, however, is, as ever, very honest and very moving. The young people regularly say how much this activity has helped them.
Overheard quote of the day was from a boy who had just done the "Forgiving" activity and, bumping into a friend, said, "Wow! That's cool..." before going on to explain how it had helped him.
Comments