Mental Health and Wellbeing Leader

Reach Foundation Workshops for Year 6: Empathy

“The great gift of human beings is that we have the power of empathy.” 

Meryl Streep

On Monday we had the Reach Foundation come to our school to run a workshop for each year six class with a focus on empathy. The facilitators quickly created a trusting and welcome environment where students were able to share their experiences and thoughts if they wished to. 

At the end of the sessions, I asked each student to think about the workshop and what it meant to them. What emotions did you experience? What did you notice about yourself? What about others? What did you learn? I then asked them to write one word on a post-it note. I put all these words into a ‘Word Cloud’. 

A word cloud is a visual representation (image) of word data. In other words, it is a collection, or cluster, of words depicted in different sizes. The bigger and bolder the word appears, the more often it’s mentioned within a given text and the more important it is.  

https://help.vevox.com/hc/en-us/articles/360009930318-Word-cloud-explained 

Here is the Word Cloud from all our year six students who participated in the workshop…

Our schedule for Reach Workshops for our senior students this year looks like this…

Year 5: 

Peer Connections – semester one

Teamwork – semester two

Year 6:

Empathy – semester one

Change & Transition – semester two.

If you would like to find out more about the Reach Foundation, please click here. 

“Empathy is about finding echoes of another person in yourself.” 

Mohsin Hamid

Have a wonderful week. 

Andy McNeilly

Mental Health and Wellbeing Leader