Newsletter – 24 May 2022

Ja Baldwin, Primary Teacher

Put your hand up if you like to have a good plan and follow it through.

I would hazard a guess that most of us have a hand up right now. Sometimes we make our own plans. Sometimes we make plans with others. Sometimes we choose to follow someone else’s plan. It is probably fair to say that many of these plans do not come to fruition, for any number of reasons. Nevertheless, all of these plans, whoever they may belong to, begin with a thought, a hope or an idea.

Late in Term 4 last year, it became apparent that many plans at Kuyper had to be changed, rescheduled or cancelled altogether. With floods, closures, lockdowns, social distancing, more closures and so on, there was a shrinking window of opportunity for Year 6 to do something to celebrate their final year in Primary school. Unexpectedly, an impromptu discussion between some Primary teachers generated a fabulous idea, which we put to Mr Shaw: The Year 6 Fun Day! 

Although time was extremely short, Year 6 students immediately began planning a Fun Day that would become a service event for the rest of Primary. In just two weeks, they had taken the original idea, and expanded, refined and organised this inaugural event. Throughout that fortnight, it was amazing to see this group of children put so much thought and effort into planning something to bless others.

23 students managed to organise and run a multitude of attractions: face painting, arts and crafts, doughnut eating, jelly bean guessing, slime-making, disco, video-games, ping-pong throwing, duck fishing, colouring, fairy-floss, thickshakes, drinks, ice-creams with toppings, lolly-bag lucky dips, home-made cookies, laser-tag, and teacher dunking! The Year 6 Fun Day was a wonderful success and I was reminded of one of my favourite verses in the book of Proverbs.

We can make our plans, but the Lord determines our steps.

Proverbs 16:9

Here are what some of the event planners had to say at the end of the day:

• I think it was great. We could have used a bit more planning but it really wasn’t bad for the first time we had done it. The slime got a lot more people than I thought and it was fun to help the little kids – Rory
• I think that it was a great success, the face paint was more popular than I thought it would be and the teacher dunking was also really fun. I was amazed at how many slimes the girls made and sold. I think that there was a lot of leftover stuff and I am happy we could eat and finish whatever we had – Alexis
• The fun day was really successful for pretty much most of us. The fairy floss was one of the most successful – Nathan

• On the fun day I was really excited to run my stall next to my friends, but I was mainly excited to sell cookies, chocolates and candy canes. I liked my idea but I think I could have done better with the cookies. Overall I had fun – Lilliana
• I was super excited but I could’ve done a lot of more to help my friends run our stand and helped more people learn how to play the games. We could’ve done better on the clean up too. But apart from that, I had a fun time running our gaming stand, doing the strobe lights at laser tag, playing with my friends during the breaks and drinking the delicious milkshakes – Jett
• I enjoyed the fun day a lot. It was a really fun, first time experience. I enjoyed going to everyone’s stall to try out things. It would have been better if COVID was not around, so we could have more things. I would have liked it if more people helped pack up because not enough people helped. I hope the kids liked my colouring competitions and colouring pages – Alyssa

• On the fun day I was super excited to do some mini games with the little children. I ran two little games that seemed very fun, I did Ping pong throw and duck fishing. Duck fishing was most popular because there were super cute rubber ducks that needed to be fished out of their little paddling pool of water. I bought 200 delicious lollies and in total I got rid of 100 super yummy Mentos and lollipops. Since it was the first year of running this year-six fun day, I consider that it was pretty well organised and run – Abigail
• The things that I thought were good about the funday were the involvement and the creativity and the ability to choose what we wanted to do. It was awesome! We could have improved the clean up – Hamish
• The fun day was great! I was really surprised because my stall sold everything so that was great. I think next year they should plan a little sooner so they wouldn’t be in such a rush the day before. Also I enjoyed seeing the little kids’ faces when they opened up their lolly bags. And it was fun running the day with my classmates – Sari

So, now the plan is for each Year 6 class to run their own interpretation of Fun Day as a parting gift to Primary.