We’ve had a fantastic time over the Easter holidays! We prepared 5 activities across the two week break, all funded and supported by Durham County Council’s Fun and Food Scheme, East Durham Rural Corridor Area Action Partnership and Sedgefield Town Council. The activities were open to any young people in school year 3+, with new attendees registering with the club and attending at least one site-based session before taking part in an off-site activity.

We held one of our usual Monday evening sessions to help encourage new attendees to meet the staff and existing members. We cooked lasagne from scratch (which was delicious!) and had lots of fun playing games.

We’re always looking to find new ways to make our core sessions more fun and have just purchased a new games console and lots of games like Just Dance to keep us busy and active!

On our second day, we had an Easter egg hunt in the local park. Although the weather could have been better, we enjoyed the physical activities, the picnic and some classic games like egg and spoon race! We did have to run inside the Parish Hall to eat our lunch when the rain got too heavy, but we’d definitely do it again.

We each got an Easter egg of our own to take home too!

On 6^th April we held a disco. With the help of our favourite DJ we spent the night dancing away and playing lots of party games with some cool props (and lots of prizes) and tucked into a lovely buffet.

When we hold our next disco, we’ll definitely get some more entertainment like a face painter and/or hair braiding as these have been so popular at out other parties before.

The following week, we held an afternoon tea where members baked in the morning and were joined by family members in the afternoon to enjoy the goodies they’d made. It was a lovely day, with 21 relatives joining us for a special treat. This is one of the first activities we’ve held where families were able to join in and spend some quality time with their children and the staff in a familiar setting. We were happy to be able to box up some leftovers for family who couldn’t attend. We collected feedback on each activity and it’s clear that the members loved spending time with their friends and family at the same time and many listed afternoon tea as an activity they would like to do in the future.

Our last event was definitely the most popular, with a trip to Billingham Forum Ice Rink. 45 minutes on the ice goes so quickly and we hired some snowmen skating aids that we had so much fun with. We had been hoping to get some food on site, but as we attended an evening session, it was closed. Not to worry, once we got back to the Parish Hall, we picked up a local takeaway and enjoyed lots of pizza, sides and pop as an extra special treat to bring our Easter fun to a close. The activity gave some of the members a chance to come out of their shell and try something they had been a little bit afraid of previously.

We’re always so glad to welcome new members and provide families with some support and relief outside of term time. We hope to secure funding for the summer holidays too so please keep an eye out on this website and Sedgefield Town Council’s twitter account @SedgefieldTC nearer the time!