Challenge Days
For the last few years Gayhurst have been working with Enabling Enterprise, an award-winning not-for-profit social enterprise, to develop and broaden our children’s understanding of skills needed going into the world, through an annual Challenge Day. Enabling Enterprise's mission is to equip young people with the aptitudes, experiences and aspirations they need to succeed in life.
We recently held a very special Challenge Day which involved all 3 primary schools in our Federation, Gayhurst, Mandeville and Kingsmead, running the same challenge day at exactly the same time! This meant over 1200 pupils from Reception to Year 6 across our partnership were busy developing their enterprise skills, to design creations that could solve the problems for this particular Challenge Day's theme: Future Transport - creating modes of transport for the year 3030.
All three schools in our partnership have, in recent years, been working hard on eco-friendly projects, such as thinking of greener ways to travel to school and ways to help keep the air as clean as possible and all won awards for their efforts in this area. So this challenge was therefore a fantastic way to combine the children's eco awareness with enterprise.
The Challenge Days get the children working in teams and aim to develop children's enterprise abilities, focusing on the following set of skills :
- Working in a Team
- Being Creative
- Listening and Understanding
- Problem Solving
- Aiming High
- Staying Positive
- Leading
- Presenting
Here are some of the comments in response to our last Challenge Day.
“It’s been great for their understanding of what it means to work in a team. Some children were upset when their ideas weren’t chosen, but it’s really important for them to realise this is how it works. They are having to stay positive and think about how they react in tricky situations.” – Teacher, Year 1
“At first I thought that some children would not work well together, but every single team worked extremely well to create a fantastic designs. Plus, some were delegating roles, others were staying positive despite their challenges… One team particularly impressed me as they found a way to combine all their ideas to come up with one prototype. I flelt really proud of them!” – Teacher, Year 2
“I’ve learnt to listen, even when I don’t agree with someone else: I have to meet in the middle.” – Student, Year 3
“Our vehicle was powered by sweets because it’s good for the environment. It doesn’t cause pollution and makes everything smell nice!” – Student, Year 1
“I really enjoyed the Challenge Day because I was able to use my imagination so much and I was also able to hear other people’s ideas and then got to use them straight away.” – Student, Year 5
