Quote by: – Bernard Kelvin Clive

Challenging yourself to try something new can give you the confidence boost you need and encourage you to push further with your personal growth. Challenges make you think harder and demand focus. Mentally challenging yourself stimulates brain function and helps to reduce anxiety and depression.

Not only was the activity of a rope swing a challenge for one young person, who was petrified, but he did it anyway and achieved it! – it also shows great support and friendship here.

Exploring woods, having fun, overcoming fears, accepting challenges – what a great day!

A few sporting challenges now.

• Overcoming fear of heights and climbing right to the top.

• New skills learnt at the bike park.

• Challenging yourself with fitness and dexterity and hand eye co-ordination with the basketball

And this young man was very brave and tried the biggest slide at the park, he was so pleased that he gave it a try and really enjoyed it!

For many adults and young people cooking is easy, they have done it for ages – for some young people it’s a massive challenge as they have never been shown how to cook a proper meal or a special treat.

Cooking is such an important life skill and at Pushforward we teach young people how buy the ingredients, prepare them, prepare the area around them for hygiene, read a recipe, cut/chop/dice and cook their dishes – helping them learn how to be independent into adulthood.

We not only see overcoming challenges here, we also see some great competition – whose pizza is better?

This young man’s challenge was to eat all that awesome food on the plate – he smashed it. Great to see a young person enjoy their food! Sometimes education is not about sitting in the classroom with a text book, it’s around the dinner table that conversational education happens with ease, because the young person is happy and confident and comfortable in their environment.

A great day out at Bewilderwood. Was this really a challenge and education? Absolutely;

• A challenge of overcoming the feat of the Zip Wire (PE),

• Identifying bugs (science)

• Navigation through trails and mazes (geography)

• Sitting on a boat for the first time (personal challenge)

• Also interacting with other young people (social skills)

Over in the Lowestoft Unit the young people are continuing to prepare the building – this week painting. What a great skill to learn – whether its for a career or just being able to carry out home improvements.

Exploring and the fun of outdoors:

• Two young people working together in the woods to build a super base.
• Exploration of local fields and spotting a deer – a chance to walk in the sunshine, fresh air – leading easily to educational conversation and feeling comfortable to chat about wellbeing
• A walk over in Sudbury Water Meadows
• A visit to National Trust site at Flatford mill, a great way to explore and learn about John Constable’s painting The Hay Wain.
• Climbing in the sunshine at West Stow
• A visit to Audley House and dreaming of owning such a beautiful house.

A week would not be complete without some potion making! Here fine motor skills were used with pipets and unscrewing small lids.

Our science experiments continue – here we are finding out what happens to coins when left in fizzy drinks:

Cutting a picture out is easy right? – for some yes, for others its a skill to be learned with hand eye co-ordination and find motor skills.

Here we see some awesome neat cutting skills in action….

Learning how to cut paper is the first step, next we do some junior woodwork…

…Now imagine what those amazing cutting skills and junior woodwork can lead on to – carpentry in the workshop. Here we have a planter being made in NM2 and a bench Lowestoft.

Or maybe you prefer metal – over in NM1 we continue to work on the MX5 project.

Here we are using the parts washer, cleaning a drive shaft before respraying and refitting.

Dr Doolittle in the making. A trip to the farm and learning how to look after the animals.

Over in Ipswich we have some Arts & Crafts making a Modpodge Memory Jar and some mindfulness coloring and squiggles – great for opening up communication with a young person.

From learning the names of 3D Shapes in Primary to learning the vocabulary for different parts of a circle in Secondary.

Another two trips:

A visit to an Anglo Saxon Village

and some Crazy Golf.

Here we are writing a treasure hunt for our friends.

Learning how to top up the screen wash of our car and trying on some PPE.

After a game of golf, a play with the drone we finish this week off with cuddles from some puppies!

Our Ethos

No one can begin to affect the world around them until they are CONFIDENT , COMFORTABLE, happy in their own skin and have found their SPARK! We take the time to understand and develop programmes from where the learner is in the world not where we think they should be.