Personal & Social Capability

CURRICULUM FOCUS

Personal and Social Capability:  We are learning to understand positive and negative thoughts

VOCABULARY

Positive Thinking: Positive thinking, or an optimistic attitude, is the practice of focusing on the good in any given situation. It can have a big impact on your physical and mental health. That doesn't mean you ignore reality or make light of problems. It simply means you approach the good and the bad in life with the expectation that things will go well.

Negative Thinking: Negative thinking refers to patterns of thinking negatively about who we are, what we do and the life we lead. Thinking positive can be difficult. Our brains are actually more likely to find negatives in situations. This is why we need to teach our brains to look for positives.

ACTIVITIES YOU CAN DO AT HOME TO SUPPORT YOUR CHILD'S LEARNING

Try the Positive VS Negative storytelling activity to explore the differences between using positive or negative thinking.

1. Form pairs or small groups of up to six people.
2. Ask one person to start by sharing the beginning of a fictional story, eg “I was walking through the forest…”
3. In response, their partner will continue the story by adding an event that is negative, “… when I stubbed my big toe on a tree root…”
4. Their partner (or next person in turn) will continue by adding an event that is positive, eg “… having kicked the tree root out of the way, I uncovered a hidden gold nugget…”
5. The story continues to be told by each partner sharing alternating negative and positive events.
6. Continue telling the story for 2 to 3 minutes.
7. Encourage all stories to arrive at a natural conclusion (if possible) and on a positive note.