Education News
Resilience, Rights and Respectful Relationships
As outlined in the last newsletter, Respectful Relationships is an initiative to support schools and early childhood education settings to promote and model respect and equality across the entire school community, and is a core component of the Victorian Curriculum.
Resilience, Rights and Respectful Relationships is a suite of age-appropriate teaching and learning materials for Foundation to Year 12 that is utilised at Moonee Ponds West Primary School to support the implementation of Respectful Relationships, helping students learn and practice social skills and apply them in a positive way to learning, life and relationships.
The materials cover social and emotional learning topics, including: Emotional Literacy, Personal Strengths, Positive Coping, Problem Solving, Stress Management, Help Seeking and Positive Gender Relations.
What is the topic of Personal Strengths?
Children and young people need a vocabulary to help them recognise and understand personal strengths and positive qualities in themselves and others. The topic provides learning activities to build this vocabulary and to use it when discussing personal, social and ethical challenges. Research in the field of positive psychology emphasises the importance of identifying and using individual strengths. Social and emotional learning programs use strength-based approaches to promote student wellbeing, positive behaviour and academic achievement.
Useful tip!
Character Strengths Definition: Your character is what makes you who you are. Character strengths are different to talents, skills and knowledge. They are attributes like courage, kindness, humour and persistence which help you make the most of your experiences and deal with your challenges. When you use positive adjectives together with a naming of the specific behaviour that you are acknowledging, children learn to value the qualities you identify.
Information for parents about the Respectful Relationships initiative is available at https://www.vic.gov.au/respectful-relationships