We follow this with reading the Lion Storyteller version. Below is a picture of Victoria at Acorn House this week. 

OT Mini courses have been going well with a new course starting at Forest with Sian and Sarah presenting. Eleanor and Sarah-Jane move into Week 3 at La Houguette along with Capelles and Beechwood. We have now surpassed 6000 children on island having been taught the courses! As one child pointed out at Phil’s recent church visit to Vazon Elim, that’s (almost!) 10% of Guernsey! 

We continue to be busy and so ask for your continued prayers for strength, health, energy and confidence as we deliver our lessons, assemblies and lunch clubs. 

Happy New Year! We hope you had a wonderful Christmas and enjoyed the celebrations.

We are very blessed to be able to be back in schools this week, with no restrictions unlike the UK. We are still probably the only OT Mini team up and running in Great Britain with Hautes Capelles, La Houguette and Beechwood courses all starting this week. La Houguette will be taken by Sarah-Jane and Eleanor in their first solo course – please pray for confidence, peace and enthusiasm from the children.

This week we were in Le Murier School working with a group of Year 9 students on a module towards their ASDAN qualification. Phil and Lisa will work with this group of students for 7 weeks helping them to plan, prepare and deliver an assembly to their fellow students. This is the fifth year we have been invited to help out and we are really looking forward to working with this group of students. This year our story is ‘The Good Samaritan’, we will develop a drama for the students to act out as well as an activity for the introduction and reflection at the end. Our theme will be the importance of helping others even those we might not get a long with all the time.

In our last blog post of 2020 we would like to share with you the fun Christmas activities we’ve been up to over the last few weeks!

Firstly, as is becoming routine, we took 7 Christmas lessons with Year 3 at Hautes Capelles, St Mary and St Micheal’s, Castel and Notre Dame. These are always a really lovely time, talking about how special Jesus is and hearing the children exclaim how “Jesus bought peace and love” or “he changed the world because he was God.” These children, at 7 or 8, may not go to church but they clearly understand the importance of Jesus and for us to share an hour with them discussing this, making booklets and talking about Christmas always makes us feel very blessed. Blessed to be able to be a presence in the schools at this time, and blessed that Jesus has not been lost amongst all the festivities that happen in schools.

As part of the lesson, the children make a booklet and write their own descriptions of what’s happening in each picture. Below is a picture of one of the booklets made.

As well as Christmas lessons, we also held a Christmas Prayer Space event at Amherst. The stations we had looked at the journeys and characters from the Christmas story. We spent three days with 265 pupils in Years 3-6 looking at forgiveness, our gifts, thinking about other people in the world, who guides us and what we are waiting for this Christmas. Through chats with teachers, we hear that the children really enjoyed the sessions and there was a sense of calm about the school during a very busy week! Thank you to all of our volunteers who gave up their time to help us. We hope you enjoy these photos of the different stations. 

Please find our Winter 2020 Newsletter here.

Finally yesterday we went out for our Christmas lunch at the Deerhound, always a special time to end the year. We hope you all have a lovely Christmas and wish you a Happy New Year! Thank you for all your support during 2020!

This week we’ve led our Advent primary assembly at Amherst, Forest, St Martins, Vale, Melrose, Vauvert and La Houguette. 

We also had great fun delivering an Advent themed assembly at La Murier this week. The students engaged well with the activities as we  looked at the importance of waiting and preparing ourselves for celebrating Christmas.

Our OT Mini courses are coming to an end with Vale, Melrose and La Mare concluding. This term we have completed 7 courses at 5 schools with 255 students. 

In senior lunch clubs as the term draws to a close we are looking at the Christmas story and having some fun with parties! BOLT will also be finishing next week with Party Week.

Finally we took Mad, Bad or God lessons at La Mare with Year 9s. These sessions always bring about good questions and discussions as we look at who Jesus is. Thank you to Matt Gregor and Tim Berry who joined us for these sessions.

Our story looks at Mary being told she is going to have a baby and the excitement she feels in waiting. We are using a word and response script so the children can interact throughout. The assembly finishes with a time of reflection and thanking God for the excitement of Advent.   

Lastly we visited Elizabeth College and Ladies College with our assembly on learning from failure. In this we explore Peter denying Jesus but that’s not the end of his story. As ever the students created some beautiful creations of Phil out of toothpaste!   

After the half term break, we’re back to work with lots planned for this half term. Phil has started three new OT Mini courses. They are at Vale with Claire Hill, Melrose with Sarah-Jane Allen and La Mare with Tim and Dorcas Berry. 

On Tuesday we spent the morning with Year 1 at Hautes Capelles learning about Creation. It was a great morning and the children really enjoyed the lesson and engaged well. 

This week we also lead a brand new lesson at La Mare High for Year 7 students called ‘Big Questions’. We explored questions on Jesus, God and the Bible and gave students the opportunity to ask any questions they wanted on Christianity. We had some great discussions with pupils on ‘Why did Jesus die?’, ‘Who is God? and ‘Is the Bible true?’. We want to say thank you to Matt Gregor from Vazon Elim who came along to help lead the sessions. 

Our lunch clubs this term are going well, in the secondary schools, numbers are great, with quite a lot of Year 7’s attending which means we can continue building the relationship with them that was started in primary. We only have two BOLT clubs running at Amherst and La Houguette but they’re both going well with the children always excited to join us! Next week we start looking at Jesus.

Last week we led an assembly at Le Murier looking at the story of Noah and thinking about how we felt during lockdown, what was hard and what we enjoyed. The students reflected on this by thinking about their worries and were encouraged to talk to others about how they are feeling. 

We started this week with a Quiet Morning with Tricia Pill looking at 1 Corinthians 12. We spent time thinking about our strengths and gifts and what we individually bring to the team. We also got to encourage each other with prayer. Thank you Tricia!

Lisa and Phil led a Year 7 assembly at Grammar, looking at fresh starts. Numbers at our PACE club later on increased because of the visit.

Finally we held a Prayer Spaces event at St Mary and St Michael’s school. The theme was Creation and using some new stations, we spent nearly two days thanking God for His Creation and thinking about how we are all special and unique. One of the stations looked at the plastic pollution and allowed the children to think of ways they could help protect the world. We really enjoyed it and we know the children did too! One highlight was when a group left the hall and passed their classmates saying; “It’s amazing! You’ll love it! It’s so fun!” Below is a collection of photos and also a video put together of the stations and responses. 

Another busy few weeks for the team. Phil has been in isolation for 2 weeks meaning Lisa, Victoria and Sarah with the help of Nigel took on the remaining puppet assemblies at Notre Dame, Vale, Castel, Vauvert, St Martins, La Mare and Capelles. We’ve had so much fun with this assembly and introducing Fanta, our elephant puppet when Oscar was unavailable. We even made it onto La Mare’s twitter feed as you can see here! Please enjoy this video of our assembly.

Sarah, Victoria and Claire Hill delivered two lessons to Year 3 at Haute Capelles. The first was an Introduction to the Bible where we looked at what the Bible is and how Christians use it. The second lesson focused in on three “Lost Parables” and why Jesus told them. We looked at The Lost Coin, The Lost Sheep and The Lost Son. In each story we discovered who each character represented and the meaning behind the parable.

Lisa took on two senior assemblies solo at Blanchelande with our New Start assembly and Ladies College looking at Passion and how one small act can make a huge impact in an unfair and unjust world.

Finally our senior lunch club attendance has increased dramatically after some assembly and form visits. At Blanchelande and Beaucamp we have seen 20-30 students attend! Thank you for your prayers.

We have had a very busy few weeks which has been great! On Saturday 19th September we held a Volunteer Training Morning. We felt a good way to start the year would be to gather our wonderful volunteers and go through a few of our resources, tips and safeguarding. We looked at lessons, Prayer Spaces and engaging with the children and heard what the volunteers enjoyed doing. As we always say we cannot do everything that we do week to week without volunteers. They make up about 15-20 hours per week! This includes lessons, lunch clubs, assemblies and increases when we have Prayer Spaces. THANK YOU!
The morning was followed by a thank you lunch which was enjoyed by all and gave us a chance to get to know everyone better.

On 22nd September we also held our AGM, later in the year than usual but well attended all the same. This time we set up stations around Forest Methodist Church presenting the different areas of our work. This included figures of what had been achieved during the year and the photos, props and even our puppets! The team shared some of their highlights from the year. Thank you to everyone who attended, we hope you enjoyed it!

Aside from these two larger events, we have also been pretty busy in schools! For our primary Creation lessons have visited St Mary and St Michael Yr 1 and 2, and Castel Yr 1 with Jean, Karen and Sarah-Jane joining us. OT Mini has started a new course at Notre Dame and for the first time in five years, Vauvert! The children have loved the first two weeks and engaged with all the hand signs and stories. A big thank you to Nigel, Frances and Emma for delivering these lessons with us.

Our puppet assemblies have been going down really well, with lots of laughter as Oscar confuses Coronavirus with “Cucumbervirus” a virus that comes from eating cucumbers. We have visited Acorn House, Melrose, La Houguette, Amherst, Forest and Vauvert so far.

Finally our lunch clubs are back with nearly all the senior schools starting again and BOLT club starting at Blanchelande, Amherst and La Houguette. Please pray particularly for attendance to these clubs. The children and students have many clubs to choose from but we would love them to try ours out too!

PACE is back! We started the week with a strategy morning hosted by our Chairman, Mark. We then shared our vision and goals for the year with the PACE advisory board which is made up of local church leaders from different denominations. It is great at the start of a new school year to stop, pause and reflect on what PACE will look like this year and think about what areas of the work have the opportunity for growth and development.

The PACE diary is already filling up with lessons, assemblies and OT Mini courses. This week we started our first OT Mini course at Vauvert, Phil will be leading this alongside Emma Backhouse (Holy Trinity) and Nigel Lewis (Les Camps).

We also took two Creation lessons at Vauvert. We have a number of these booked in, with more requests flying in. Primary schools often start their RE curriculum looking at Creation in September so it is a perfect time for us to visit the younger years of the school and spend time with them. These will be with Year 1 and/or 2. For this week’s lessons our volunteers were Mick Leggett (Eldad), Frances Ogier (Spurgeon) and Emma Backhouse. The lessons went really well and were enjoyed by the children, teachers and volunteers! The feedback from the class teacher was:

“Thank you again so much for this morning. The children loved it, I loved it!”

This week we delivered an assembly on having a fresh start at the start of a new school year. It included drawing a portrait of Phil out of toothpaste and a challenge to get the paste back into the tube. This was to illustrate how we can’t change what has happened in the past however much we may want to, just like we can’t get the toothpaste back into the tube! We closed by drawing on the story of Peter and how even though he denied Jesus that didn’t stop him from playing his role in starting the early church. We concluded by encouraging the students to make the most of opportunities that come their way this year. This was held at La Mare High and will be held at Beaucamp in the following weeks.