The 'Elementals'© Course
In 2017 GST began to construct an educational course for our learners. With our highly qualified, experienced staff and working with our colleagues from Volunteering Matters we offer a new education course called ‘Elementals’. Based around the four elements the course contains two central streams:
- core learning which covers numeracy, literacy, the basic sciences concerning food, climate, horticulture and environmental awareness with Food, Transport and Energy as our central themes.
- personal learning and independent living skills. We try very hard to meet the needs of our learners and focus on what they feel they need help with.
Many of our learners have had a poor experience of education. We feel strongly that it is never too late to learn and progress and so we offer a informal environment, learner lead and using as few traditional recording methods as possible which we have found so often produces a hostile reaction. Learning to access and cope with the digital world is a very important area of study. As our pilot project continues in 2018 we are finding our approach is working very well and we are now oversubscribed. We would like to run Elementals twice a week and are currently seeking funding to enable this to happen.
2019 kicked off to a good start in Elementals with our learners beginning to use our new tablets with more confidence. We also welcomed Sky from UK Parliament - a session designed for people with learning difficulties - which was really well presented and informative. Everyone enjoyed it and was very engaged with Sky asking questions and answering questions.
