Wellbeing

Wellbeing in Grade 3

Wellbeing is being explicitly taught every week in all year levels across the school. The current whole school focus is on developing our knowledge and skills around Emotional Literacy. When we develop and improve our emotional literacy skills, it allows us to cope with different life situations such as managing conflict, making friends, coping in difficult situations and being resilient when dealing with change.

Emotional literacy teaching involves giving students opportunities to:

Develop their ability to understand and express emotions.
Practise recognising their own feelings and how to manage them.

Emotional literacy skills are needed by students in order for them to be able to:

Cooperate.
Manage conflict.
Make friends.
Cope.
Be resilient when dealing with change.
Recognise and manage their own feelings.
Manage stress, set goals and plan for the future.

Increase feelings of connectedness to school and peers.
Increase feelings of acceptance from peers and teachers.

In Grade 3, Wellbeing has been integrated into their Start Up program at the beginning of the term, with a particular focus on having a growth mindset (what that means and how we practise it). Grade 3 classes explored emotional literacy by identifying and talking about feelings and how our thoughts can influence these feelings. They discussed and compared helpful and unhelpful thoughts. Students recorded a variety of unhelpful thoughts and were challenged to turn them around into helpful thoughts. This can also be referred to as a growth mindset and using positive self-talk. Working on our emotional literacy gives us opportunities to develop our ability to understand and express different emotions. It also helps us to recognise our feelings and how to manage them. Having a growth mindset is an important component of being a successful learner.

Daily Wellbeing reflection is undertaken by using our student diaries to identify people/things we are grateful for. Some classes have incorporated Snap Bags into the daily Wellbeing routine where they write a positive comment to a member of the class and ‘post’ it in their Snap Bag. Snap bags get checked at the end of the week.

Using a Catastrophe Scale to promote resilience. The catastrophe scale is designed to help students see their problems in perspective, and understand the scale of their issues. It aims to develop confidence and resilience in students.

Classes were inspired by the story “How full is your bucket?” and worked to understand how our actions can affect other people as well as ourselves. We want to become “bucket fillers” not “bucket dippers”. Students write gratitude statements to their peers with the idea being that by doing so will foster positive emotions in both the parties.

The Grade 3 students have also learnt about the Character Strengths. Character strengths are the positive qualities that a person possesses naturally and impact the way a person thinks, feels and behaves in their life. Character strengths are used to help define our own core identity. There are 24 character strengths divided into six groups.

Wisdom and Knowledge: Creativity, Curiosity, Judgement, Love of Learning, Perspective.

Courage: Bravery, Honesty, Perseverance, Zest.

Humanity: Kindness, Love, Social Intelligence.

Justice: Fairness, Leadership, Teamwork.

Temperance: Forgiveness, Humility, Prudence, Self-Regulation.

Transcendence: Appreciation of Excellence and Beauty, Gratitude, Hope, Humour, Spirituality.

Students learned to identify their own Character Strengths and to identify Character Strengths that others display.

It’s been a very busy term in Grade 3.

Students talk about what Wellbeing means to them

Some things that you can do at home to build Emotional literacy skills and habits as a family

Around the dinner table ask everyone to share a feeling they felt during that day. Discuss how they dealt with that feeling and then discuss and share strategies you could use when faced with particular feelings.

As a family begin by discussing a time you may have felt unpleasant feelings (angry, sad, frustrated, nervous, furious, anxious, jealous, etc). What were some of the thoughts going through your head?• Together, brainstorm some more ‘helpful, positive’ thoughts that could help turn your feelings around to make you feel better.• Record these brainstormed ideas on post it notes or pieces of paper and display them on a poster, wall space or display board of some kind (eg: corkboard or whiteboard).• You have now created a family positive self-talk graffiti wall that you can add to and refer to when needed. As a family you may want to call it something different.