Every Friday in seasons 3 and 4 I have participated in a service which meets with kids from the YMCA. For the first few weeks, we came together without the kids so that we could come up with ideas and plan our future sessions. When we had our first session with the kids, we were all a little bit worried as we didn’t know what they would be like. We took them on a short tour of the school and started to talk with some of the kids. They seemed very keen to talk to us and see everything around the school. We then took them to the playground, which we later found out was their favourite activity they did with us.

The next sessions we did many other activities with them such as drawing, crafts, duck duck goose, bullrush and we continued to go to the playground. Throughout these activities, we talked to and got to know many of the kids. On the last day, we were in small groups and each group drew on one piece of paper. Then, while they were playing at the playground, we put all the pieces of paper together to create one large piece.

I think that for next year, we should continue to go to the playground as that was their favourite thing to do. However, I think that we need to be more prepared for our sessions with the kids. Too many times we met with the kids not really knowing what we were going to do. In order for us to be more prepared, we could create a shared document with all the dates that we will have sessions with the kids. We can all contribute and put different ideas/activities that we can do for all of these sessions. We can also use it as an attendance document; we would put our names on the document and for every session, say if we were going to go or not.