Caine’s Arcade: An inspiring story of an entrepreneur in the making.

Being creative is a wonderful way to enhance our well-being! The act of thinking something through, working as part of a team and producing an outcome has many well-being benefits. These include strengthening relationships and having a sense of purpose.

For the students in 11JL, they were motivated by Caine’s story (which you MUST watch here) and this led to them planning, designing, trialling and tweaking their own cardboard arcade games. When they were completed, staff and other students all played the arcade games, which was hugely successful and great for everyone’s well-being!

It was obvious from the pride and enthusiasm on students' faces as they explained and demonstrated their games that they were pleased to see what they had produced.

This project has sat alongside students doing some active recreation (with a number of options on offer), Health Education and the lead in to community projects, which are about to get underway.

As workload and assessments increase it is important to us at Hagley that our students have an opportunity to spend time on their well-being and drop their shoulders and relax. It is also important students are well equipped with strategies to assist with stress and are armed with some study techniques and time for independent study. Our focus leading into the second half of the term is around study skills, community contribution and sexuality education.

I’m sure as parents you want happy teens!! So do we! Our biggest challenge is to get students not over-thinking this time. It serves a range of functions and not everything students are involved in will make them burst with happiness, but they will start to understand and value time spent doing something for their well-being.

We can all take something from that…as I write this my back is hurting from sitting and I realise I’m starving. Time to take a well-being break!