Personal Development Week!

Team Maclean always love personal development week. Not only is it a great way to ease back into the school routine after a break, but we always have deep, meaningful discussion, and this week has been the best yet!

PSHE:

We have been talking about feeling safe this week, both on and offline. During sessions, we have been discussing things that have made us feel unsafe and how we have resolved this, who to speak to when we do feel unsafe and ways we can avoid it. We also spoke about secrets and which ones we should and shouldn't keep. It is worth noting here that the subject of abuse did come up during our PSHE sessions,  through the children's own questioning, which was spoken about in a safe and sensitive way.

RE:

We have been learning all about Jewish stories and festivals! We explored the festivals of: Shabbat, Rosh Hashanah, Sukkot and Hanukkah! We read the stories behind these festivals, why and how Jewish families celebrate them and related them to our own religions and experiences! The children particularily enjoyed the Story of Esther when learning about the festival of Purim!

Personal Development:

Our focus of PD this week has been collaboration! We have been dicussing the importance of working together, learning how to talk to each other with respect, how to hold a 2-way conversation and carrying out various activities related to these across the week!

On Friday, we put our skills to the test and played lots of games that required strong collaboration skills! Here are some highlights!

 

Spots on heads!

The children were given either red, green, blue or yellow spots on their heads. They didn't know what colour their own spot was and their aim was to work together as a class to get into groups of the same colour without using their voices. They worked extremely well together and did it within a minute!

 Back Canvas!

In partners, with one whiteboard and pen, the children took it in turns to draw or write on each other's backs with their finger, while the other child had to draw/write what they felt on their back. They had to be patient with eachother, communicate if they were going too fast or weren't clear enough!

Human Pretzel! 

In small groups, the children began by standing in a circle and all holding hands in a jumble in the middle. Without letting go of anybody's hands, they had to untangle eachother by talking and being patient, while using trial and error.

Get up!

In partners, the children had to sit back to back, link arms and try to stand without letting go. Although this began with lots of splatting on the floor, the children eventually realised they needed to communicate in order to stand!

Association!

This game was really lovely, a calm ending to our mad games! Dotted around the room, there were lots of pieces of paper with different words, drawing and shapes. The children went around, writing and drawing different things around the words that they associated with it. Although they didn't necessarily need to collaborate for this game, they had some really interesting conversations together and sparked ideas off of one another.

 

It has been such a wonderful week and hope this level of enagement and interation continues over the rest of the term! :)