Fuel Your School Culture with Fun

School Culture

While there are many exciting aspects of a school environment, it can be easy for students to lose a sense of passion and joy for school when they fall into the mundane of a school routine. To maintain a sense of excitement and zeal within your school, we encourage you to schedule fun into your school agenda! Fun and play uniquely connect people to their hearts, activate childlikeness, and ignite their dreams and passions. While it could seem nebulous or a waste of precious school time to schedule in fun activities, it is actually a key ingredient to developing an engaging school environment, fostering deeper levels of connection amongst students, and cultivating a thriving school culture.

To help you begin to think about incorporating fun festivities into your school schedule, keep the following keys in mind and watch the fruit of joy be released in your school.

  1. Lean into Holy Spirit. Seek the Holy Spirit and discover what fun looks like for your school. There may be times where He asks you to toss the schedule aside for unstructured, spontaneous encounters in His Presence. Invite Holy Spirit to guide you as you lead class times to experience His joy. Also, provide space for your students to grow in hearing God’s voice and moving in tune with His presence.
  1. Be authentic. Bring your own sense of fun and creativity into the school environment. If you love Star Wars, use an illustration from one the movies to explain your point in class. If you love sports, consider hosting a basketball tournament or a Super Bowl viewing party. Do you love TV? Play prophetic games using that theme (e.g. get a word of knowledge for a person’s favorite childhood TV show). If you want to try something fun (even something that hasn’t been done before), go for it! Great fruit is produced when we are willing to take risks to experience greater levels of joy.
  1. Start with your leadership team. Whether it’s time set aside during school leadership team meeting or during a retreat, find moments to have fun as a team! When students see and experience the fun, close connections shared amongst your team’s members, they will feel invited to recreate those relationships amongst one another.
  1. Empower students to lead. Your students are experts in what they like to do for fun! We encourage you to create space for them to organize and lead fun school activities. It develops their leadership skills as well as their sense of connection with each other. Depending on the size of your school, you could have a weekly or monthly signup where groups of students lead a fun activity.
  1. Keep it simple. Taking time to do simple acts of kindness and celebration will foster joy in your school! For example, you could celebrate students’ birthdays each month with a song, some cake, and prophesy.

As school leaders, you have the exciting privilege of cultivating a joy-filled school environment. While you build relationships with your students and cultivate your school’s culture, may you be blessed with an abundance of joy and rich connection. And may this year be the most fun year yet!

For more posts about cultivating a strong school culture, click here.

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