Explorers Club
Explorers is a jointly run afterschool club here at SUN school with friends from our Church, St Marys Sulhamstead and from school.
It was started about 25 years ago by a teacher at the school and a couple of parents from the church. The aim was to explore the Christian faith in a fun and exciting way and to foster links between the school and the church. And it is still running with those aims today. The club is open to all children from SUN school from Year 1 to Year 6. It has been encouraging to see many of our old pupils going along to the Christian Union at The Willink, our main feeder secondary school. Here the Christian faith is explored and discussed along side eating cake! All children from Explorers and the school along with their families are always very welcome at the services at St Marys. Explorers are invited to take part in special services from time to time at church.
A typical session starts with a drink and a snack and a chance to relax after a busy day at school. We then play some games outside with Hide and Seek being all the time favourite. We explore a story from the bible and there is usually a craft or activity linked to this. We end our time together with a short reflection that includes a song and a prayer.
In recent times we have made prayer boxes for each classes worship area. The boxes contain crosses, candles, and different coloured drapes to reflect the colours of the church year. As well we made scrap books of the bible stories that accompany the School Values. We appreciated the help with the coloured cloth from friends at the church.
We spent a year doing a Bible overview from cover to cover using The Block Buster Bible. This book takes a look behind the scenes of the bible and uses the theme of films. Each week the children acted out the story using the clapper board and shouting Lights, Camera Action! We were thrilled to have the author Andrew Pritchard come and talk to us!
This school year we are exploring the Christian values of the school. We have just finishing considering how to be thankful and have been out and about in the school grounds.
A big thank you to all those families who took part in the travelling crib scenes leading up to Christmas. We have enjoyed reading about your Christmas activities and traditions and seeing the crib sets you made. We hope it gave you pleasure doing it and also learning about the Christmas story .
We have just restarted Explorers for the Spring term and it has been good to welcome some new faces to the group.
This term our value is Trust. Despite the pouring rain we attempted to play some trust games on the playground and learning how hard it is to trust someone else.
The story that accompanies the School value of trust is Jesus calming the storm. We discussed why this story was chosen as the disciples didnt trust Jesus to keep them safe but having seen how he stilled the wind and waves they were then able to put their trust in him .
We painted pebbles with the theme of trust on them and these will be hidden around the Parish for people to find. Keep your eyes open as you walk around Ufton Nervet!
Watch this space as we have some exciting news about the toilet twinning project to share with you in the next newsletter!
Sian Webb
Yvonne Cook
Rachel Belshaw
