October Outings

October half term can, at first glance, seem quite insignificant. It is sandwiched between our big summer outings (the beach, picnics in the park, overnight residential) and our exciting Christmas outings (going to the theatre, ice skating). However, it is an important holiday for a lot of our children. It is the first holiday since the start of a new term, in a new school year and, for some of our children, in a new school. This holiday is a chance for our children to get together with their friends and discuss how their new school experience is going. This is one of the main aims of our outings programme- to create peer relationships in families who have an HIV diagnosis.

As such, we always place an emphasis on our October outings. As a Christian charity, we don't celebrate Halloween but we do have an annual light party which we invite our primary school children and parents to. This year we received a generous donation of Build-A-Bear teddy bear 'skins' which means that our craft activity was already sorted (see below)! We also used the time to play some team-building games and eat together.

Our teenagers went on one of our most requested outings- the trampoline park! We are very lucky to be surrounded by so many of these and have our pick of the different types. The children enjoy showing off to each other and even the shyest ones are hurling themselves into the foam pit by the end of the session.

With the tensions of a new term, it is important to give our children the chance to blow off some steam, act like kids and forget about the pressures of academia for a few hours.