7 benefits of a school enrichment day with Fun Matters

Enrichment days are a fantastic opportunity for students to develop important life skills such as teamwork and leadership skills. Enrichment days also offer pupils a chance to challenge their abilities and develop new friendships. Enrichment days can come in many forms, from school trips to sports days. At Fun Matters, we offer activity day packages that are perfect for creating a fun and enriching environment for pupils of all ages. Most schools we work with will tie the event into either a celebration event or an ice-breaker event. Some schools use our activity day packages as a way to reward pupils following a challenging time such as post-exam season. Other schools use our events for back-to-school sessions to help new pupils engage with each other and develop their confidence. Whatever the basis for your school enrichment day, we can offer 7 key benefits to your pupils.

1.      Team Building

As a senior educator, you will know how important teamwork is as a life skill and therefore how important it is for schools to offer a range of opportunities to develop team-building skills in various settings. Enrichment days are the ideal setting to develop team-building skills centred on outdoor physical activities and games.

We offer a range of equipment and stations which can be run as both head-to-head games and team activities. For our “it’s a knockout” events, we normally create teams of 8–10 pupils who then have to work together to defeat the other teams in each of the stations before a final battle between the top two teams of the day. We find this highly engaging for the pupils and it creates the ideal mix of team working and competitive behaviour. Creating teams also helps to ensure all pupils feel involved and engaged as teammates help to cheer on and motivate each other, further aiding in the development of supportive team-working behaviours that will be of benefit to the students in many future situations.

2.      Leadership Skills

Leadership skills are an important life skill and one which is highly desirable in the workplace. Therefore, schools need to offer opportunities for students to develop leadership skills. Leadership skills allow students to learn the art of building relationships within teams, defining identities and achieving tasks effectively. It also provides an opportunity to learn to identify and display effective communication and interpersonal skills.

When we set up teams of pupils for our activity days, we are creating an ideal situation for students to test and develop their leadership skills within a team and learn how to influence and motivate their team to get the best out of them and so increase their chance of winning. These are skills that are directly applicable to the workplace and school leadership environments.

3.      Confidence Development

Being confident about something you’ve never tried before is hard. Many students suffer from feelings of self-doubt and a general lack of confidence, particularly when trying new things. By creating enrichment days that offer pupils new challenges, you can offer pupils a safe environment to test their abilities and improve their confidence in themselves. Giving them a challenge in a relaxed, ungraded and supportive environment can grow the students’ confidence and ability more rapidly and with less stress.

Although most of our games have a physical skill element, we are always pleased to hear from pupils who don’t consider themselves sporty or particularly physically adept yet still love our events and find themselves being far more successful than expected. These pupils then feel more confident trying new sports and appreciating their physical ability when meeting new challenges.

4.      Relationship Development

The ability to make new friends and connections can be an invaluable life skill and is often overlooked in a traditional classroom. Throughout their lives, pupils will need to be able to develop new relationships with others both for personal benefit and in a workplace setting. Therefore, helping pupils to not only develop new friendships on the day but also develop the skills to better create new connections in the future is a key benefit of enrichment days.

Dauntsey’s School is a great example of this. Every year they run a back-to-school event for new and returning pupils. This helps to re-establish existing friendships and also develop new ones while providing pupils with a relaxed environment to learn about their classmates. We have found this is particularly useful for boarding schools, which may have new pupils joining who are boarding for the first time.

5.      Coordination Skills

Hand–eye coordination is a key skill for primary school pupils and one which is commonly developed through sports and P.E. lessons. However, for pupils who are potentially more shy or nervous in sporty settings, an enrichment day can be an ideal opportunity to help them develop these skills in a relaxed environment.

We find this benefit is particularly important for the primary schools we run events for where we can provide a selection of stations and activities which are slightly less challenging than at our secondary school events. In the past, we have also found that this type of enrichment day can be useful for schools with an SEN department that may wish to offer sport and physical skills development opportunities to SEN students specifically.  

6.      Good Sportsmanship

Another important life skill is good sportsmanship. This is an often overlooked life skill but one which can be hugely beneficial in the workplace, particularly when developing new peer relationships in competitive fields such as sales and marketing. The key to developing good sportsmanship is to teach pupils how to balance to be enthusiastic about winning and also be gracious in defeat.

By creating team competition, a Fun Matters’ enrichment day offers an ideal situation to practice and encourage good sportsmanship in your pupils of all ages.

7.      Determination and Challenges 

Creating challenges for pupils encourages them to develop skills in determination and problem solving. These are important soft skills for their future both academically and in the workplace. We often see younger pupils flourishing through our events as they work to overcome the challenges set for them at our activity stations.

Pupils leave our events with a sense of success and improved self-esteem as they can see their own abilities in a new light. If you are interested in offering an enrichment day for your pupils, get in touch for a quotation today.