Published 20-06-2013
The Cox Motor Group has very close links with Ripley St Thomas with David Cox MD’s son attending the school, along with children from the senior management and staff.
Because of this strong association, and the fact that Cox Motor Group is a great believer in supporting local causes and community projects, they jumped at the chance to be involved with Honda’s School of Dreams programme, which took place at the school earlier this month.
Lancaster Honda, along with Honda UK, visited Ripley St Thomas Academy to provide a 2 day creative thinking workshop.
Pupils from Forton Primary and Cockerham Parochial C of E Primary also attended, giving children the chance to get to know their future teachers.
Honda believes dreams are extremely valuable and should be pursued. The School of Dreams workshop is designed to help children fulfil their dreams by teaching them the skills and strategies needed in a fun and creative way.
The first day started with a lesson a juggling. This was to emphasise Soichiro Honda’s philosophy that "success is 99% failure", and you can only get better by practise.
The pupils were then divided into six different groups and discussed the importance of dreams. They were told about Mr. Honda’s dream of building a jet plane and the dreams of other famous people. These included Nelson Mandela, JK Rowling, and Eleanor Simmonds.
While in their groups the pupils were tasked with building a Native American dream catcher to emphasise the importance of team work.
After lunch there was a competition to do a relay involving various tasks, which the teams had to split up amongst themselves. Each team member had to choose two tasks that would suit their strengths. The relay taught the pupils about team leadership, individual strengths and the fact that everyone is clever at something. The teachers won, but had their title stripped due to them cheating!
Change was the subject of the second day. While in their teams from the day before, the pupils had to think about something they hated and how they could make it better. The teams had to produce a presentation, in front of invited guests, of what they hate, why they hate it, how they would change it and how they would monitor the changes. ‘Hates’ included smoking, bullying, ignorance and animal cruelty.
The School of Dreams workshop has been carefully managed against the National Curriculum’s Personal Learning and Thinking Skills framework. Over the 2 days pupils experienced all ten of the learning strategies identified in the ‘Leading in Learning’ education initiative. Special care was also taken to ensure that all material from Honda was directly relevant to teaching objectives.
Ian Greene praised the workshop, “A very interesting two days. The transformation in the pupil’s confidence, teamwork and their imagination was incredible. It was difficult to separate the older and younger children at the end of the course. I would highly recommend the course to anyone.”
Ruth Burr, the Progress Leader at Ripley St Thomas agreed, “The programme was presented in a professional manner, the pace and content were just right to engage all the pupils. It was great to see their confidence and team-work grow.”