Monday, June 05, 2006

The illusion of extended schools?

Sorry it has been a bit of a gap again, busy at the end of 2 weeks ago then a weeks holiday, great time of refreshing visiting my parents who very kindly got up in the mornings with the boys enabling us to get a little more sleep. So what has happened since I last wrote? Well there was obviously the Extended schools day, this was alright some good stuff at the beginning of the day especially coming to it from a position leaning more towards ignorance on the whole subject, however as the day went on we split into two groups one for our area and another for another groups of schools represented, here we had opportunity to chat and think about the way forward, this was great and some of it was helpful, unfortunately we had a facilitator who seemed to have his own agenda and actually we spent to much time talking About one issue that wasn’t really an issue and shouldn’t have been talked about this meant that some of the stuff we could perhaps have got done that could have been really helpful was not even talked about. I think our facilitator wanted to take us forward to somewhere we were passed. Oh well we’ll see what happens next, hoping to use the bus to gather information from some of the young people which should be good.
Back to work yesterday I was performing an illusion which went well but did bring up what I think can be a common issue. It was an all age service and the bit I did was something that the WHOLE church could enjoy (I’m not just saying that it was fun and something that was relevant across the ages) but many of the children have the attitude that church is boring and spend the service colouring etc. and so those who could have learnt and enjoyed my input were already switched off and missed it, how do we get around these issues without asking the children to ‘come and sit at the front’ which wouldn’t have worked in this situation anyway?