Children from five different Prince Albert schools took part in a youth leadership workshop at the Margo Fournier Centre on Thursday.
With the partnership of the Lakeland District for Sport, Culture and Recreation (LDSCR) and the Prince Albert Parkland Health Region (PAPHR), the Take the Lead! youth leadership training session was the second to be held in collaboration with multiple schools.
Take the Lead! is an initiative that promotes youth to stay active, become leaders, promote the community and build relationships with peers. It also offers adults the chance to be leadership coaches.
“It’s a youth-designed leadership program for the average age of students in Grade 5 and 6 to teach their peers how to participate in physical activity programs and team-building activities on the playground,” said Crystal Clarke, community development co-ordinator with the LDSCR.
Problem solving, communication and what it means to be a leader were just a few of the topics that were explored during the session.
St. Michael, Westview, Vincent Massey, King George and St. John Community Schools were each represented by six students and two staff members for the workshop on Thursday.
“We’re training 30 kids today to get information and experiences from each school and provide them with more of a support base in their learning,” Clarke said.
Each school was asked to facilitate one of the modules for the session.
Tanya Price-Wright, community school co-ordinator at Vincent Massey Community School, said the schools use various methods to incorporate what the students learned into daily activities.
“It depends on the school,” she said. “There are a couple of unique ways that they use the students ... Some of them just use it as we do — the kids to go out at recess time and initiate games with the younger kids.
“Some of them use their program as really part of the curriculum,” Price-Wright continued. “They go right in and teach a whole classroom as part of the health curriculum about leadership and about training. And then those kids teach it to another grade.”
Adults are trained as facilitators to help carry the program forward in their schools, though it is the students who take ownership and leadership of their own programming.
While the Take the Lead! program is available across the province, the template used for Thursday’s session was developed in Prince Albert.
Clarke said a workshop to train students from rural communities will be held in the near future.
