Open Doors (1) - Festival of Learning

Open Doors runs every Friday at our offices in the Naylor Leyland Centre, Well Street, Ruthin; 1PM-3PM. All are welcome to pop in. The club is volunteer led, and is a support network to meet new people and learn new skills.

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Festival of Learning

Once again DVSC hosted the Festival of Learning/Adult Learners’ Month this year with sessions that took place, as part of our Friday Open Doors Club, over six consecutive weeks from 15th June-20th July. In total 70 people got involved in the sessions.

The Open Doors club has grown in a year to support promotion of good health and wellbeing by offering learning opportunities and to meet with other people reducing isolation. The funding gave the opportunity to provide a series of taster sessions for participants who wished to take up learning but were unsure as to what they would like to do.

The sessions were chosen with practical life skills and the Five Ways to Wellbeing (Connect, be active, take notice, give and keep learning) in mind so that participants not only learned a new skill but also enjoyed an activity that would improve their general wellbeing.

Dealing with Difficult Situations

Our first session, Dealing with Difficult Situations, was delivered by Unllais and focused on how to take notice and deal with difficult situations in life by teaching some assertiveness techniques we could all use when we connect with others.

Healthy Eating

The following week Mostyn Kitchen Garden delivered a Healthy Eating session to help our learners understand what makes a balanced diet, the factors affecting food choices, strategies to help reduce the cost of healthy eating and how to adapt recipes and meals to comply with healthy eating guidelines.

Budgeting

To finish off our June sessions Eirwyn Jones of Coleg Llandrillo came to teach a session on Budgeting, teaching the participants to look more carefully at where and how they do their shopping; looking at what is essential and non-essential spending and looking at things like 2 for 1 offers and whether they are they good value.

Drumming with Darren Jones

[endif]--July’s sessions started with a bang! On 6th July Darren Jones (General Drum) delivered a very exciting Drumming session. Darren’s unique session helped the group to connect and take notice of each other whilst also being surprisingly active and learning how to play drums. The heat of the day wasn’t even enough to put off the learners’ enthusiasm for the session!

Tai Chi with Ed Fisher

On 13th July, things quietened down to a more sedate pace for a Tai Chi taster with Ed Fisher. Ed taught the group how to connect with their bodies, take notice of their breathing and keep active.

Arts and Craft with Cynnig

Finally we finished off our sessions with an Art session with Cynnig, who helped our learners connect with their creative side to make colourful totems.

For more information about upcoming Open Door activities, like the Festival of Learning sessions, go to www.denbighshirevolunteers.net and keep an eye out on our Facebook and Twitter profiles for more events.