Social Development Day

In September we were visited by Austin Dunne of Stay Focussed Training, Celbridge, for a social development day, to help each of the TY classes, Selam and Desta my own class, bond better.

At the beginning some people felt awkward because we were asked about one embarrassing thing that happened to us, but in the long run it benefited the day because people became more open.

We introduced each other to find out more about our other classmates and then we played games, and got in to different groups to get to know everybody in the class, especially those that we didn’t usually talk to.

We made posters in our groups to learn to work together to produce something, and we had two separate debates that taught us to listen to each other and respect other peoples points of view.

We did simple personality tests to find out more about ourselves and in the process we also found out more about each other.

There were four different types of people that we could be, Yellow were crazy and fun loving, Green were calm and caring, Red were loud, forceful and very opinionated, and Blue were observing, punctual, and matter of fact. (I’m a boring blue I’m afraid!)

We also learned if we were introverted or extroverted, which helped us to learn to calm down or speak up.

Austin taught us how to use body language and tone in our favour to get across the message that we want to portray.

Austin also did a test with ‘Tayto’ and ‘King’ crisps to see if anybody could tell the difference. Not many people could which showed that advertising swayed our opinions. It was handy because many people’s bellies were rumbling at that stage!

Austin came back to visit us a few weeks later to award us our certificates which we will receive properly at the end of the year on TY night. It’s gonna be awesome WOOO! =D

Pamela