Humanutopia Blog

Today, Year 6 walked to Newark Hill to attend the Big Jump Conference delivered by the Humanutopia project! Before we tell you all about our day, here is some background information about the Humanutopia project!

What is the Humanutopia project?

In collaboration with other four other GAT academies in the Peterborough region, Year 6 will be taking part in a personal development programme.  The project will consist of a programme of sessions which look at ‘Who Am I?’ and  identifying ‘Heroes’ - pupils that Humanutopia will train to  become positive role models across the academy.

Who Am I? 

This strand of the project will look at the influences of others, peer pressure and the culture of conformity; encouraging children to reflect on their attitude, behaviour and their  impact on others as well as identifying where their true potential may lie and what their futures could be about.

Heroes Training 

This will identify pupils to become positive role models in the academy. Heroes training will help them discover the skills they will need to help make a difference to themselves and other people. We will look at influencing factors and what attributes they will need to become successful. They will gain confidence in speaking in small groups, 1:1 etc. They will also focus on the key attributes of a good mentor by exploring what it is to be a teenager in 2017 and how to help with their own struggles; helping heroes will help them to become pro-active change makers in their own community.

Upon arrival, we were shown to the hall which was filled with lots of purple jumpers! There were 90 Year 6 children from Newark Hill and 30 ‘Heroes’ (Year 10 students) from City of Peterborough Academy. Despite feeling a little nervous, everyone found a seat amongst the sea of children.

To start with, we learnt a little bit about the Humanutopia team and then began meeting each other. We had to ‘hop’ to the next seat so we had an opportunity to talk with lots of other children. We were given questions to discuss and some of us shared our answers with the entire hall. We recognised that for some of us, this was very difficult and we felt very much out of our comfort zone. This idea developed further and we started thinking about our comfort zone: where we are most comfortable but perhaps not challenged, our stretch zone: when we are challenged enough to help us develop but not too much so that we are put off and that leads us to our panic zone: when something is too difficult or feared that we can’t or don’t want to even try. Although we only briefly discussed this today, hopefully we will learn more about this in the future.

After a long lunch playing together we headed back to the hall and got into mixed groups. We were given a task of creating products to try and sell! Not only did we need to turn on our creativity switches in our brains, we had the extra challenge of communicating and working with unfamiliar, different people. Despite all of those obstacles and a time limit, each group invented a product and some groups had the opportunity to present these ideas to the rest of the hall!

To finish the day, we started to think about what life would like in 20 years, we had a special remote control that fast forwarded life 20 years. Each group had to come up with a short piece of drama to present what they think life may be like!

What a super day filled with lots of new experiences! As your teacher Year 6, I was very proud to see some of you leaving your comfort zone and entering the stretch zone today, well done!