This week our team will be busy with a variety of lunch clubs, lessons and assemblies.

We will have assemblies at Vale, St Martins, Beechwood, La Mare de Carteret Primary, Acorn House, Blanchelande, Amherst, Melrose and Ladies College.

Our primary assemblies have the theme of “God’s Love Never Goes Off” where we explain that God’s love doesn’t have a sell by date, and is new every morning. This includes an exciting sketch with food that has gone “off” including a green orange..!

BOLT clubs began last week with an great number of children attending in each of the five schools. This week the theme is “God Loves Me”.

OT Mini will also continue into Week 2 in Hautes Capelles, St Mary and St Michael and Amherst Primary schools.

Happy New Year from the PACE team!

We have hit the ground running in 2018, having already led a Quiet Spaces day at Melrose and delivered R.E. lessons on the Christian approach to money and gambling at Blanchelande.

This week we are starting BOLT clubs in five new schools: Amherst, Forest, St Martin’s, Notre Dame and Beechwood. Week one’s theme is ‘God created the world.’ Senior clubs are also starting again.

We have assemblies at Blanchelande (senior), La Houguette, Vale Infants, Vauvert, Forest, Le Murier and Ladies’ College.

This is also a busy time for Walk Through the Bible presenters as there are courses beginning at six different schools this week: Hautes Capelles, St Mary and St Michael’s and Amherst (run by PACE) and La Mare de Carteret, Castel and Blanchelande (run by Roger Brooks and Bev Oldfield). So over 300 children will be doing ‘Walk Through’ this week!

Have a great week!

Today we taught two lessons at Castel Primary school. We used a Christmas RE inspire lesson plan. The lesson focused on the question, ‘Has Christmas lost its true meaning?’ We started off by asking the children what Christmas means to them and then compared it to what Christmas means to Christians. We then looked at the Nativity story as well as the Papa Panov story. The children finished by making their own nativity book.

This will be the last week of puppet assemblies. They will take place at Amherst infants, Le Rondin and La Mare. We will also be teaching some lessons at Castel with the theme of Christmas. We will be using a RE inspire lesson plan and have asked volunteers to come and help with group work within the lesson. We are also very excited to be having a prayer space day at St Mary and St Michael on Friday. Using the theme of advent we hope to provide an environment for each child in the school to be able to reflect, pray and explore emotions.

The secondary team are very busy this week planning for lessons, assemblies and lunch clubs for next term. Please pray for energy for the whole team as we approach the end of term.

Last week we finished our primary lunch clubs with a party! We organised some Christmas themed games as well as playing some of the children’s favorite games from the lunch clubs. It has been a pleasure getting to know the children over the last 11 weeks and have found our time with them valuable. We would also like to thank our volunteers for all of their hard work and dedication. We are looking forward to starting the clubs again after Christmas for year four children at Amherst, St Martins, Forest, Notre Dame and Beechwood.

We had the pleasure of visiting St Sampson’s church on Sunday to share about the work of PACE and to create a mini prayer space event based on what we do in schools. We hope that the church was encouraged by what we shared. We would like to thank them for their prayers and continued support for us as a team.

The PACE senior team are leading assemblies in Elizabeth College, St Sampson’s High School and Ladies College this week on the theme of Advent. We look at different traditions from around the world. Did you know that in Japan, Christmas remains a novelty, with a few small secular traditions, such as, gift giving and light displays? However, a new, quirky “tradition” has emerged – a Christmas day feast from KFC! We then look at the importance of preparing for Christmas and take some time to reflect on the reason for the season, thinking about the tradition of advent wreaths and what the different candles stand for: Hope, Peace, Joy, Love and Jesus. To finish we play a video of the Nativity story.

We are very busy with our puppet assembly this week. Over the next few weeks we will be visiting all the primary schools on the island for our puppet assembly. Our puppet Oscar (the children’s favorite) will be talking about how he is preparing for Christmas. With the presenter and puppet Amy’s help he will reminded that the real reason for Christmas is Jesus. This week we will be visiting Hautes Capelles, Notre Dame, Castel, La Houguette, Blanchelande, Vale and Vauvert.

We are now in week 10 of our primary lunch clubs. This is the last teaching week and next week we will be having our party! We are looking at ‘We can be friends with God’. We ask the children ‘Why do you think God created the world?’ ‘Why did God send Jesus?’ ‘Why does God want us to pray?’

We have now covered 10 truths from the Bible, these are:

God created the world

God loves us

God made us special

God has plans for us

God hears and answers our prayers

God in three parts

Jesus came to do good

Jesus died for us

Jesus rose again

We can be friends with God

In September I visited the Prayer Spaces in Schools Day Conference in London. It was a fantastic opportunity to meet other people, hear their stories and share resources.

The day began with an overview of what had been happening over the last 12 months including some incredible figures:
In ten years, there have been 2800 prayer spaces events, that we know of, happen across the world with an estimated 1 million children experiencing them. This is incredible and so encouraging.

Izzie who is 16 shared her experience of prayer spaces in her school explaining how amazing it was and helpful for her as she settled into a new school. She talked about her initial response of “wow” as she walked into the room which had been transformed and how “it helped me to be myself”. She has now left that school to go on to college, but has returned to help out with a Prayer Space event and plans to do more in the future.

The morning continued with a chance to break into groups and talk to other people. We were able to discuss what we did, swap ideas, talk about what had gone well and what hadn’t. It was really interesting to hear other people’s ideas and stories from their experiences.

We were then introduced to the partnership with Christian Aid and had a sneak peak at the “Justice” themed activates which have now been released. These looked at understanding and praying for people around the world. We have already used one of these and hope to use more in the future.

Then Julian Stern, head of Education and Theology at York St John University, and his co-researcher Rachael Shillitoe introduced themselves and went through their Evaluation of Prayer Spaces in Schools: Interim Report. This is a report that they are doing, evaluating the contribution of Prayer Spaces in Schools to the spiritual development of young people. We all had a copy and they went through it, explaining how they’d interviewed children and staff in seven schools as well as using a questionnaire in 24 schools. This report was based on the initial analysis of some of these interviews and questionnaires.

The report goes into detail of what the responses revealed the children were getting out of prayer spaces and how it was helping their spiritual growth. It also looked at some of the controversies and issues that were raised by parents and from further research.

They then concluded that Prayer Spaces in Schools does contribute to the spiritual development of children and young people, however as this was an interim report there was a lot more further research to do and information to analyse.

After lunch we settled back in for a bit of a celebration. These conferences marked 10 years of Prayer Spaces in Schools. We watched a video where we got to see how widespread this movement is. There were flags from all around the world that we pinned around the church representing everywhere that had held prayer spaces (including Guernsey and Jersey). In total 31 countries have been involved.

I attended a workshop on Researching Prayer Spaces which was a conversation with Julian and Racheal. This brought up many interesting topics including how they conducted the interviews, worded the questions and the issues that arose from that. This was a great time to delve into the research more and discuss it further.

I came away from the conference with some great new ideas for activities which I will look into further as well as becoming more aware of the impact that this has on the children in our schools and the possibilities of the future.

We have some prayer spaces events coming up in our schools. If you would like to get involved and volunteer for an hour or two please email pace@cwgsy.net.

Please also visit www.prayerspacesinschools.com

Sarah

Photos from Sarah and Prayer Spaces in Schools

Last week the senior team were teaching year 7 students at Blanchelande College on the christian view of creation. The sessions started with the question ‘what came first the chicken or the egg?’ which led to interesting discussions about how the egg could have got there without the chicken or did the chicken evolve from dinosaurs! These lessons went well with the students interacting with lots of different activities centred around the creation story we read about in Genesis 1. It was a great opportunity to hear their thoughts on creation and be able to debate whether science and religion are compatible when it comes to thinking about the creation of a wonderful planet!

This week the senior team are visiting Ladies College for an assembly on Ecclesiastes 3:1 – ‘There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens’ where the team explore how all our emotions are important and have a part to play in our lives. Taking inspiration from the movie Inside Out – a film about a young girl dealing with big changes in her life, the film focuses on her different emotions and how they all need to work together to get her through the difficult time. We are also visiting Le Murier School for a session on the theme of advent and the time of preparation in the lead up to Christmas. Thinking about our own family traditions and what Christians see as important things to remember at this time of year.