Wellbeing
with Mrs Hodgson
Understanding the Children's Wellbeing Continuum
At our school, student wellbeing is at the heart of everything we do. We know that children learn best when they feel safe, supported, connected and ready to learn. One of the ways we can support this is by using the Children's Wellbeing Continuum in classrooms to understand how students are feeling.
The Wellbeing Continuum helps students recognise and understand their emotions, energy levels and readiness for learning. It encourages children to reflect on how they are feeling and identify strategies that may help them move towards a calmer, more focused state.
Students may experience a range of feelings throughout the day depending on what is happening at school, at home or with friends. The continuum helps normalise these feelings and reminds students that all emotions are okay — what matters is learning healthy ways to respond to them.
We are currently trialling the implementation of a morning wellbeing check in 3/4B with the view to implement this across the school in Semester 2. Students in 3/4B answer the following questions each morning:
How are you feeling - good, coping, struggling or overwhelmed
Do you feel safe at school?
Do you feel safe at home?
Do you need to speak to a trusted adult?
The teacher can quickly scan the results and then provide support and checkins where needed. This also gives us a good indication of how the students are going over a period of time and who needs some extra support. The students also have a small wellbeing continuum on their desk where they can show how they are feeling throughout the day.
As we move to implement this wellbeing checkin across the school, staff will be provided with Professional Learning to support the implementation, and social stories will be presented to the students to set them up for success with not only the check in but how they can use strategies to return to a more calmer feeling.
We will continue to provide updates, and share how the implementaion of this great initiative is going.
Lunchtime Clubs
Run Club
Our Friday Run Club has now journeyed over 760km! This is as far as Sydney to Byron Bay!
We are very proud of our amazing runners!
Useful Websites:
Looking after your child's mental health:
Easing into Adolescence
The Department of Education has launched an Easing into
adolescence webpage for families of students aged 10 to 14 (Grade 5 to Year 8).
The webpage has information and strategies you can use to help ease your child into adolescence and secondary school. These include:
- a guide to emotion coaching. Staff from The University of Melbourne’s Tuning in to Teens Kids program developed the guidance.
- how to support your adolescent with their studies and more generally. Parenting expert and clinical psychologist Andrew Fuller helped develop this resource.
Subtitles for videos by The University of Melbourne on the webpage are available in 10 languages. You can select your preferred language on the translations page.
Schoolwide Positive Behaviour Supports
Reward System
SWPBS focuses on multi-tiered interventions to promote positive behaviours. As part of the approach to enabling a strong school culture which embodies our school values, we have put in place a whole school sticker rewards system.
Aim of the Reward System
At DPS we have implemented a reward system to reward positive behaviours that are necessary for promoting a positive and supportive school environment. These positive behaviours are based on our four values of Compassion, Resilience, Respect and Responsibility. Part of our reward system includes the handing out of stickers which are distributed by staff when the students are "caught" displaying one or more of the values.