St. Martin de Porres Primary School

Wellbeing News

Building Respectful Relationships at SMDP

At SMDP, we are committed to fostering a whole-school culture of respect and equality.  We believe this approach is crucial for positively impacting our students' academic outcomes, mental health, classroom behavior, and relationships with teachers.

 

Respectful relationships education is a core part of the Victorian Curriculum, and we utilize the Resilience, Rights and Respectful Relationships teaching and learning materials to support its delivery. This learning is integrated into both Health and Physical Education and Personal and Social Capability curriculam.

  • Health and Physical Education: Students develop the knowledge, understanding, and skills to strengthen their sense of self and build and manage safe and respectful relationships.

  • Personal and Social Capability: Students learn to recognize and regulate emotions, develop empathy for others, and establish a framework for positive relationships. A key focus is developing the ability to understand and respond to their own and others' emotional states.

This year we will be covering six core topics of the program.

 

Topic 1: Emotional literacy 

Students develop the ability to be aware of, understand and use information about the emotional states of themselves and others. 

 

Topic 2: Personal and cultural strengths 

Students develop a vocabulary to help them recognise and understand strengths and positive qualities in themselves and others. They identify the values and strengths they have learnt from role models within their families and culture to think about how this guidance helps them to treat others with respect. 

 

Topic 3: Positive coping

Students develop language around coping, critically reflect on their coping strategies and extend their repertoire of positive coping strategies.

 

Topic 4: Problem Solving

Students learn a range of problem-solving techniques to apply when confronting personal, social and ethical dilemmas. They engage in scenario based learning tasks to practise their problem-solving skills in relevant situations. 

 

Topic 5: Stress management 

Students consider the causes of stress and develop a range of self regulation and coping strategies they can draw on to manage stressful situations.

 

Topic 6: Help Seeking 

Students develop skills and knowledge for peer support, peer referral and help-seeking.

 

 

Kathy Blythe

Wellbeing Leader