Primary school mentoring – Limbo and Learning

The challenge for this session, themed on doing your best, was to think of a fun activity that everyone could take part in and that would be a reflection on how we all do our best in daily life. The solution Sarah and myself came up with was Limbo! It seemed practical as we could lower and lift the string to reflect that sometimes you have to try harder to try your best, and set high standards for your behaviour.

We used a piece of string to create the bar, the girls all queued up to go underneath once, and then a second time with the bar even lower. They were all really excellent and all achieved limbo status, some were very acrobatic about it and some cheated a little! This was an interesting way of reflecting on how to respond to a challenge by making it easier on yourself, by practising the task, and we tried to get them to reflect on how they’d felt taking part in the limbo, really confident or not so confident?

We then completed the learning styles quiz from the How to be a Mosaic Mentor handbook (p.34), called what type of learner are you? Having completed the quiz and tallied up the results we then separated out into the groups of learners (by colour) and they came up with a group name:

• Green Gorgeous Gummy Girls – Kinaesthetic learners, like to learn using your body, by doing.
• Pitch Perfect – Auditory learners, like to learn using sound and listening.
• Red Readers – Visual learners, like to learn through images and reading.

See here for a list of more learning styles and explanations.

After this activity we discussed that this could help motivate you to try your best if you know what type of learner you are. Everyone was quite high energy on that afternoon so we played some group drama games such as the zap elimination game and finished off with completing the reflection sheets for the session on Trying Your Best.

We then had two Mum’s who managed to make it to the session on British Education. Both Mum’s had entirely different educational pathways, one had four children and a PhD in Chemical Engineering. The other Mum had a Level 1 qualification in Arabic and had begun an English speaking course, but had lost her place through a family illness she’d had to deal with.

We structured the session as a conversation that was guided through our own educational pathways, so Sarah and myself shared our different experiences of education and answered any questions about those. For example, how long does it take to study to become a doctor? When we said several years, it was then, how long to become a vet? How long to become a dentist?

Reflections:

• On reflection I think it would have been good to discuss motivation at the start of the session, explaining the term, then in pairs discuss how motivated do they feel today on a scale of 1-5?

The idea of being a type of learner is one that could be picked up on in the next few sessions by putting them into their learner style group and giving them activities to explore further how they like to learn.