Opportunities for Children
Buddies
Primary Peer Mentoring (Buddies)
At West Minster we operate a Buddy scheme. The aim of Buddies is to have older children helping the younger ones have positive experiences of playtime.
Children from Years 5 and 6 apply to be Buddies to children in the KS1, KS2 and Year R playgrounds. They will have demonstrated why they would make good Buddies and what skills they can bring to the scheme. Once appointed, Buddies operate on a rota basis, spending morning and lunch breaks in the individual playgrounds, organising and playing games, assisting children who are having friendship issues and generally ensuring all children have a happy and enjoyable playtime.
Irene Montgomery from Project Salus has trained groups of children within the school to become peer mentors.
Potential outcomes for individuals and educational settings include:
- Improved communication skills
- Increase in self-esteem and confidence
- Encourages and develops peer relationships
- Increase ability to understand and empathise with others
- Develop decision making skills
- Develop conflict resolution skills
- Instil a sense of responsibility
- Develop a sense of community and belonging
- Improved behaviour
- Improved attendance
- Reduction in bullying
Anti-Bullying Ambassadors
PROUD TO BE A PART OF THE DIANA AWARD
The Anti-Bullying Ambassador programme is part of the charity, the Diana Award. The Diana Award was founded as a legacy to Diana, Princess of Wales’ belief that young people have the power to change the world for the better.
Since 1999, the Diana Award has recognised 39,000 ordinary young people who have made an extraordinary difference to their community.
The Diana Award does three things:
1: encourage young people for the contribution to their communities
2: empower young people to achieve their full potential
3: engage young people in social action to make a difference in the lives of others, through the Anti-bullying, Training and Mentoring Programmes.
At West Minster we have four young people that as well as being Buddies are also trained Anti-Bullying Ambassadors.
School Council
Our School Council represents the views of all our pupils. It gives children the opportunity to make their voices heard and feel part of the whole school community.
PE Competitions
Every year at SWF we offer our children a number of opportunities to represent our schools in a range of competitions. We take part in a number of Inter-School, School Games Competitions across our calendar year, as well as our SWF varsity competitions.
Our Inter-School competitions are where a number of schools from Sheppey and Sittingbourne compete against each other for 1st, 2nd and 3rd place. If these competitions are also part of the School Games Events the winning school will get to go to the county finals to represent our area.
Our SWF varsity fixtures events are run with-in our schools termly. We are lucky enough to have two schools (West Minster and Rose Street) making up the Sheerness West Federation. Each term teams are selected to represent each school and take part in a competition against each other. The winning school then gets to keep the varsity shield for the following term until the next event. We have run this for the last two years. The first year West Minster ran out the overall winners while last year Rose Street came out on top. We are looking forward to seeing who wins this year!
We are excited to announce that competitions we be back up and running this academic year!
Keep your eyes peeled for our event dates, coming very soon!
For live updates and results during the events check out our school twitter pages! @West_Minster @Rose__Street @SWF_PE
Virtual Challenges
Each term we run two virtual challenges within school. Every child is given the opportunity to take part in these challenges and then the top 5 scores from KS1 and KS2 make it onto our leader board in the hall.
This term our challenges are;
How far can you chest throw a basketball?
How quickly can you run the Illinois Agility Test?
Home Challenge
This year we are introducing a new ‘home challenge’. Each term the PE team will set a little challenge for you to do at home with your family to earn yourself some dojo points. It is also a good way to stay fit at home which this year is more important than ever.
This term your home challenge is;
To balance the strangest thing somewhere on your body or to perform a balance in the strangest place.
We look forward to seeing how you get on! Remember to post your pictures of videos onto dojo so that we can see.