Partnering with Nurturing Foundations, we ran a workshop series for children aged 11-16, teaching them key skills and allowing them to engage with some of our great Common Sense contributors.
Our Brief:
As a result of the nationwide lockdowns, secondary school students have missed out on crucial opportunities to learn non-academic skills which are vital to their personal growth. Over the course of 2020, it has also become clearer that isolation from other people their age can be terrible for children’s mental health. So, when Nurturing Foundations approached us with the desire that we would put together a series of virtual sessions for secondary school students, we were confident that we wanted to help counter these two problems and help provide a safe space for children to grow, learn and have fun!
Our Idea
At Common Sense, we have a wonderful network of people, ranging from journalists to video editors to events managers who all have great stories to share and the lessons that come with them. This proposition gave us the opportunity to make the most of our Common Sense contributors, many of whom were eager to volunteer to help in this situation. This meant that we were able to put together pairs of facilitators for our sessions who would complement each other well whilst also providing a range of experiences.
We also decided to choose two overarching themes to cover: communication and resilience, skills which are invaluable anytime but are perhaps even more important now than ever. Each session would then focus on a specific aspect of these themes such as public speaking for communication and dealing with failure for resilience. Complemented by the candid and friendly conversations with the students, this meant that a respectful rapport would be built between the attendees and the facilitators, thus attracting the participants to the following session.
Our Events
We ran the events over two courses so we have covered many topics but here is a little insight into the content of one of our sessions involving videos, games and interactive tasks!
