Happy New Year! We hope you had a great Christmas and New Year!

We’re back and excited for what 2022 will bring us. Each term we try to hold a Quiet Morning – a time for us as a team to receive teaching as we give out so much in our work. This time we headed to St Saviours and Sarah-Jane Allen hosted us in the lovely upper room of their Hall. SJ led us through the theme of choices and looking back at how God has been with us through difficult choices and how we can be encouraged that when things seem tough, He is always with us. One verse we read was Psalm 139:7-10:

Because of restrictions in schools, we are unable to restart our lunch clubs and assemblies at least for the time being. In response to this we have sent our primary schools our virtual assembly that we made during lockdown last year. This has been received well once again and we’re pleased that some of the schools are using it. If you would like to watch our assembly you can find it here!

We’re very pleased that we are able to go into some schools for lessons and OT Mini/ NT Mini. This week we have started new OT Mini courses at La Houguette with Nigel, Sarah-Jane and Eleanor, Castel with Phil and Forest with Sarah and Sian. Phil has also started an NT Mini course at Beechwood. We’re having to adapt a little but Week 1 has gone well so far!

Please pray for the schools, staff and students as they adjust to the new measures and get used to changes in their day to day activities. 

Here is our latest Newsletter, we hope you enjoy reading about what we have got up to over the last few months. 

We wish you a very Happy Christmas and Happy New Year!

We’re nearing the end of term but not slowing down! Our Christmas in a Box lessons have been going very well and the children and teachers are really enjoying it! We have delivered this lesson to Castel, La Houguette, Melrose, Forest and La Mare. Next week we will be visiting St Mary and St Michael’s and Blanchelande. We have loved delivering these lessons and have learnt many things along the way. Here are some photos from some of the sessions this week!

Not only have we been busy with this but we also hosted a Prayer Spaces at Blanchelande this week! We took the children on a journey through Advent and looked at each character from the Christmas story. We thought about forgiveness and letting go of things with Mary and Joseph, praying for those treated unfairly in the world like the Shepherds, how we can offer our gifts to help other people and knowing that God is always with us and guides us through life with the Wise Men and enjoying the excitement of waiting for Christmas! 

We would like to thank all of our supporters and volunteers and wish you all a very Happy Christmas! We thank God for all the amazing opportunities He has blessed us with over this past term and look forward to what’s to come in 2022!!

As we all know, this is a busy time of year and for us it keeps getting busier! 
We’ve delivered our primary puppet assembly to Amherst, Forest, Acorn House, Beechwood, Notre Dame, Melrose, Vale and Vauvert. Unfortunately we’ve had a few cancelations due to the current situation but we hope we can get back into those schools soon. 

We’re also busy preparing for our upcoming Christmas in a Box lessons which we are very excited for. Since our training evening we have put together this video of our time together – we hope you like it!

We’ll be starting these lessons next week so please continue to pray for this new project! 

We have also delivered an assembly at Ladies College on ‘unlikely heroes’. We start with a quiz where they have to guess the unlikely hero from films, for example Wreck it Ralph and Frodo. People who get things wrong but end up being the hero.

We go on to look at stories from the modern day, sport and the Bible. We conclude that we all have the potential to do great things but we have to keep going and over come obstacles and be bold and courageous in your actions.

In our secondary lunch clubs we are enjoying exploring the Christmas story and having some good discussions with the students. We’re also enjoying playing lots of different games! 

Christmas in a Box has officially begun!! We led our first session with a home schooling group and learnt a lot along the way. It was great fun and the children loved it. We used the time to see what worked best and what needed some work and it really helped us. We followed this with a second training evening on Monday. This was a more hands on session where our wonderful volunteers got to use the script and have a go at leading a box. We are now busy booking in our lessons and are very excited to use this in schools! Please do get in touch if you are interested in Christmas in a Box.

We are now also back into primary schools for our Christmas puppet assembly! In this one our puppet Fanta the elephant is about to try out for the part of Mary in her school nativity. She feels like she won’t get the part because she looks different from other children so she decides to try some new hairstyles! After realising these don’t help, she uses some change mixture that a Mad Scientist made her and ends up turning into a donkey, a mince pie and then another puppet. Using the shepherds and learning how they didn’t need to change themselves to be involved in God’s story, Fanta learns that she just needs to be herself! Does she get the part of Mary?

We’ve already presented this at La Rondin, Vauvert and La Houguette all who loved it! There’s plenty of laughter from the children but an important message for them. 

OT Mini courses are going well at Melrose and La Mare and Phil has started  two new back to back courses at Vale.

Finally this week we took La Mare’s Year 11 students to Trinity Church for our “Faith in Community” lesson. They got to tour the new offices of Guernsey Welfare and Caring for Ex-Offenders. Mary and Sue, who are involved in these charities, shared with the students about what they do to serve the local community.  An eye opening time for many who may not have known what else is done on the island by churches. 

Please continue to pray for the island’s schools, their students and teachers as we see a rise of cases during this winter season. We are hearing from schools of cases and so ask for prayers of protection over our team as we continue our work. 

We’ve made it to half term! After a busy few weeks and the team coming down with the usual coughs and colds we are pleased to be able to take a break, visit family and rest up before the even busier second half of term and Christmas!

In the last two weeks we have visited Year 1s at Castel, Hautes Capelles, St Mary and St Michaels and Notre Dame for our Creation lesson. We love spending time with the Year 1s and hearing how we should take care of the wonderful world that God created for us! We also get to see some lovely crestions that they make out of Play-doh. We’ve seen waves, mountains, volcanos, butterflies, chocolate pizzas and cakes piled high with toppings!

Phil and Victoria also led the second lesson looking at Parables for Year 3 at Hautes Capelles where they looked at The Lost Coin, The Lost Sheep and The Lost Son stories. 

This week also marked the end of the two OT Mini courses at La Rondin and St Mary and St Michaels, both having been fantastic and thoroughly enjoyed by the children. One child from La Rondin told Phil; “Monday afternoons are my favourite part of school now!” It’s a shame we couldn’t spend longer with these groups but we look forward to moving on to other schools after half term and starting the courses again! 

Finally we finished the half term with our Quiet Morning. This time with Sian Street at Forest Methodist. Our focus was on Mark 10:46-52, the story of Bartimaeus and the question Jesus asked “What can I do for you?” As always these are so valuable for the team, a chance for us to stop and receive teaching for ourselves. Thank you Sian!

This week started with a New Beginnings assembly at La Mare de Carteret High with Phil and Lisa which went really well.

On Tuesday Phil, Victoria and Sian Street led a Creation lesson with Year 1s at Forest. It’s a very fun lesson enjoyed by the children and leaders! Phil also led a lesson on The Bible at Hautes Capelles for their Year 3s as they begin to look at this in RE. Next week Phil will continue this with a lesson on Parables. These have become a yearly booking and we love that we get asked back! 

We also all attended a Zoom training course for Christmas in a Box to make sure we are well prepared for when we launch it in schools in November. It is a great initiative and we can’t wait to get started.

Our primary assemblies have been continuing this week at Beechwood, St Mary and St Michael’s and Blanchelande. The children have responded really well with the poem and seem to enjoy the interaction!

This morning Lisa and Victoria led our Harvest assembly at Le Murier which included an activity to reflect on what the students are thankful for. They were able to write this down at the end of the assembly.

Please continue to pray for the team especially as they fight through the normal September/October coughs and colds! Pray for health and energy! Thank you!

   Over the last few days we have launched our Harvest primary assembly for this half of the term. So far we’ve visited Vale, Vauvert and Notre Dame. The children have responded well and teachers have commented on how fitting it is with what they’re doing.
   The assembly starts with a bit of fun, one of us starts eating some toast because we didn’t have time before the assembly. The other presenter then asks them to say thank you for their food and after saying thank you to the children and presenter we explain that they should say thank you to God because God was there at the very beginning of when the seed was sown in the field. We then go on to tell this with a poem in the tune of the nursery rhyme The House that Jack Built. We introduce the seed, corn, farmer, miller, baker, shopkeeper and parent all who played a vital role in the production of the toast! We are very busy next week with a lot of these assemblies so please keep us in your prayers that they go well! 

Lunch clubs have started back again including BOLT clubs at Blanchelande, Vale and Amherst and St Mary and St Michael’s and La Houguette starting next week. These have started well with great attendance and some amazing questions about God, Jesus and what Christians believe. In our secondary clubs, we’ve seen a return of students from last year which is brilliant.

OT Mini has also started with a course at La Rondin with Phil, Eleanor and Frances. St Mary and St Michael’s started this week with Phil and Sarah presenting. Bookings are coming in fast for these courses and other lessons both in primary and secondary schools which we’re really pleased about!

We are back! Back to booking, back to planning, back to visiting the students of Guernsey and delivering assemblies, lunch clubs, prayer spaces and exciting lessons!

We’re hoping and praying for an uninterrupted term and have spent some time looking at our goals. A great way for us to start the term was to look at what went well last year and what we’d like to achieve this year. For example we’d love to teach our OT Mini sessions in EVERY primary school this year (interrupted last year because of lockdown!)

As a team we are also very excited for some new opportunities coming our way. We will be starting our new Christmas In A Box lessons this year. If you haven’t heard of it yet, watch this video! Tomorrow we have our Volunteer Morning where we will be looking at this more!