HANNAH HEUNIS

THE INTERMEDIATE PHASE learners, who missed Lateral Learning in 2020 due to the lockdown, were very excited about the activities this year.

They would finally be able to have fun and miss some class, even though it was very different from previous years.

Everything did not go smoothly: there were fights and tears, like the time that they couldn’t figure out the one activity. The girls did not think that it would be possible to stack nails on top of each other, but the facilitator showed them that it could be done, and this taught them once again that nothing was impossible.

The most fun activity of all was the one where girls had to stack cups into a pyramid. They were all given an elastic band that had strings attached to five rings. If they took their fingers out of the rings or broke the elastic band they were disqualified. The trick was to pick up a cup with the elastic band, take it to another table and build the pyramid.

 ‘I was in Team Blue, and I was trying my best to ignore the other team. When we got to the fifth cup we got the hang of it,’ says Lewa Cona. She remembers how stressed they were about the last cup: would they be able to put it on top without letting the pyramid fall over?

In the end it wasn’t about winning – as always – but learning to work together!