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.

Today is the last day of term, so we wanted to post our Summer newsletter summarising all that we have been up to over the last term. With it having been such a short term, it is only one sided this time but still full of exciting news!
As we returned to schools sooner than we’d thought we managed to complete all our Transition lessons with the students in Year 6. We were very pleased to be able to do this and confident that as always God’s timing was perfect. 
We would also like to inform you of our AGM date. Please see the poster below. This will be held on Tuesday 22nd September, 7pm for refreshments with a 7:30pm start at Forest Methodist Church. We hope to see you there!
Thank you for your continued support.
We hope you have a lovely Summer.

It has been a fantastic two weeks as we have been back in schools working with students again. We run weekly lunch clubs in all the secondary schools and we have been able to go back to five of them to have an end of year party. It has been great to reconnect with students after 3 months of lockdown and hear about their experiences and all they have been up too. It is a real privilege to be part of their school journey and we look forward to carrying on with all the clubs in the new school year. 

This week we have also started to deliver Transition lessons with Year 6’s moving up to secondary school. This session looks at the ‘Changes, Challenges and Choices’ students may face as they move to their new school. As part of the lesson we give out a booklet called ‘It’s Your Move’. This is a resource produced by Scripture Union which includes great advice and  encouragement from students and teachers as well as fun activities and thought provoking questions to help students prepare for secondary school! Local churches have bought the books as a gift to their local primary school so we want to say a massive thank you for the 650 books we will hand out over the next few weeks. We also encourage church leaders to come to the lessons so that they can hand out the books and many have taken up that opportunity to meet with the students. This week we have delivered the session at Blanchelande, Forest, Notre Dame and St Mary and St Michael. 

We have also been busy completing our 6 OT Mini courses with various combinations of volunteers and Phil. We had 20 lessons to deliver and we were so pleased to be able to get back and complete the courses. This week we have finished the course at St Mary and St Michael with Phil and Sarah and Hautes Capelles with Phil and Claire Hill. We look forward to seeing the pupils next year for NT Mini!

We’re so excited to be able to go back into schools! Now that we’re entering into Phase 5, we have started to take bookings again which is great. We had a few OT Mini courses that were unfinished due to lockdown so we’re looking forward to completing those. At this time of year we also offer our Year 6 Transition Lesson on ‘Changes, Challenges and Choices’ so going back into schools means we have the opportunity to present this session in potentially every primary school. This is such an important session for Guernsey’s Year 6 students. And we’re so pleased we can reassure them that PACE will be around for them in their secondary schools.

Over the last few weeks, now that we can have real team meetings as opposed to Zoom meetings, we have been looking at some “Big Questions” together. Questions that we may get asked in lessons or lunch clubs during discussions. Sometimes it can be difficult to give a balanced answer, especially when we haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about it ourselves. It can also be difficult to put it into “child friendly language”. For example in BOLT clubs, the leaders may get asked questions such as, “How is it possible that God hears everyone’s prayers?” or “Who made God?” Sometimes when put on the spot it can be difficult to have an answer formed so we decided to spend some time together looking at how to respond to these questions. Tim Keller has some fantastic resources that we will be dipping into as we discuss these things as a team. We believe it will not only strengthen our work but also our faith and understanding.

You might recall a few weeks ago we sent out a DIY Prayer Spaces pack to our primary schools. In the last few days we have received feedback and pictures from Notre Dame, who set up their own Prayer Spaces room! Have a look at the pictures below. We’re so pleased that this resource was used and helpful to the staff and children attending school during lockdown.

“The staff really valued having the Prayer Spaces available to take ‘wobbly’ children to if needed in addition to group sessions. The worries that the children wrote down were very revealing and gave us all a good insight into how they are feeling and how difficult this time has been for them.” – Teresa Cable (Deputy Headteacher)

For the first time in over two months we were able to meet together as a team (socially distanced) for our Monday meeting this week. It was lovely to be back together in person. Even though it is not looking like we’ll be going back into schools soon we are still working on projects ready for when we are fully back up and running. One of these is producing new leaflets for churches, and schools, both primary and secondary. These will outline the work that we offer and how we can support the schools and students. With Victoria as the new “designer” we’re keeping them consistent and looking smart! You can see our church leaflet below. If you would like a PDF copy of this leaflet or physical copies, please let us know.

A note from Phil… One of the good aspects of the lockdown has been the opportunity of more space to prepare lessons…..and one particular area has been in preparing the new New Testament Mini course. For several years we have been teaching OT Mini, but the 5-week NT course has been ‘on hold’ with no presenters available. However with 8 more OT Mini presenters trained last year, there will now be time to teach NT Mini again, so I have spent the last 2 months putting a course together – involving numerous ‘Zoom conference calls’ to Walk through the Bible HQ as well as conversations with current NT Mini presenters in the UK to share ideas and resources. As with OT Mini, it involves a whole variety of exciting interactive teaching methods including drama, storytelling, role play, PowerPoint, video, music, games, discussion and even ‘magic tricks’; all involving numerous class volunteers to help teach the main storyline of the New Testament – summarised (as with OT Mini) by 40 actions/words which the pupils learn along the way. Sadly, the current restrictions on our physically going into schools means the 3 courses booked for this term have had to be postponed…..but, hopefully, only until the autumn! I can’t wait…..!

As you know, some of our schools went back this week with the rest returning next week. We know that this will be a difficult transition period for both students and teachers as they adjust to new rules and bubbles. Please keep them in your prayers.

We have quite a bit to share with you this week, some exciting developments in our work in supporting schools during this difficult time. We had some discussions with teachers and discovered that what the schools would benefit from was some sort of Prayer Spaces event. However as we cannot go in to deliver this, Sarah put together a “DIY Prayer Space” pack and we sent it out to all the primary schools last week. This was inspired by the Prayer Spaces At Home activities that have been released over the last 8 weeks on.

Looking at the stations that we normally do, we selected 5 that needed little effort to set up but would cover emotions such as; worry, thankfulness, bravery, and encourage children to ask questions and be still in a time of uncertainty. Have a look at our Prayer Spaces Pack and feel free to use at home for yourself or your family. We also encourage you to look at the Prayer Spaces in Schools resources. 

Our next exciting news is that finally we have gone live with Our History page! It’s been long awaited and took longer than we thought it would but finally we have a timeline of how PACE started and key moments that have happened over the last 30 years! Visit Our History page and see how much the work has grown! We have been so blessed and thank God for everything we have achieved. Thank you to every team member who contributed and reminisced over their time with PACE to help us put this together. We pray that the work continues to grow and we can keep serving our local schools.

Lastly, it has been announced that primary schools will start going back on 8th June. It’s great to be moving in the right direction in getting back to some kind of ‘normal’. However we know it will be a stressful, difficult, worrying process for both teachers and children as well as their families. We just ask that you keep all of these people in your prayers. Let’s pray for peace and calm as everyone adjusts to their new days and activities. 

We would also like to share with you this lovely picture that Lisa took last weekend of two painted stones she found at Rousse. One has “PACE” and the other “Acceptance” with a cross for a ‘t’. We don’t know who painted them or why but it was just a lovely reminder that our work in schools with the students has an impact and is being missed. We can’t wait to get back to delivering all our activities and seeing our students!

….and so this uniquely strange term continues! Although we’re currently unable to go into schools of course, we are busy using the ‘time out’ to prepare for our return……whenever that may be! One particular venture which has now become a regular event is focussed on the Y6 leavers who should be moving on to secondary school in the autumn. For the last 2 years we have purchased copies of the Scripture Union booklet It’s your move (1.6 million copies have been distributed to primary schools in the UK since 2001) to present to every Y6 pupil in our local primary schools as a gift from the local churches, and our plans for this year are no different with our biggest project so far – 28 local churches giving booklets to all 640 pupils in all our 15 primary schools – this year including Le Rondin for the first time! Along with this, every school has also requested the one hour transition lesson we offer to explore Changes, Challenges and Choices the pupils will face in the next few months as they prepare to move….                                        As last year, we hope to welcome representatives from each local church to present the booklet at the end of the lesson – Covid-19 permitting!  

So…the booklets have been purchased….the lessons are ready…..we are good to go!! …whenever!

Phil 

We would also like to wish you a Happy Liberation Day! We hope you enjoy whatever your celebrations look like this year!