Assistant Principal's Report

Wellbeing Update

The Resilience Project – Emotional Literacy

As you would already be aware, this year we have commenced our partnership with The Resilience Project. Across the whole school we continue to learn about and practise the principles of GEM that are embedded throughout the program. In previous newsletters I have touched on the principles of Gratitude, Empathy and Mindfulness. Today, we will explore how these all come together through learning about emotional literacy. 

Working on our emotional literacy gives us opportunities to develop our ability to understand and express different emotions. When we improve our emotional literacy, we can work towards recognising our own feelings and our ability to manage them. This allows us to cope with different life situations, such as managing conflict, making friends, coping in difficult situations, and being resilient when dealing with change.

Whole Family Activity:

Feelings Charades

• Gather as a family, this might be around the dinner table, lounge room, or a place the family is comfortable with.
• Take turns to act out a feeling or emotion. Use your face and body language to act this out, for example: Make an angry face and stamp your feet or ????
• Other family members need to guess the feeling/emotion.
• After someone has guessed the feeling/emotion, have family members discuss a time they have felt this way before and why. If it was a negative emotion, how did they overcome it?

Family Habit Builder:

Ask everyone to share a feeling they felt during that day. Discuss how they dealt with that feeling and then discuss and share strategies you could use when faced with feelings.

I Can – Parent Talk

Throughout 2023 and 2024 our school has partnered with the I Can Network, Australia’s largest autistic-led organisation, to support our students in embracing their imaginations and provide professional learning for our staff on inclusive education.

In Term One this year they implemented the ‘I Can Imagination Club’ – their primary school mentoring program which is based on supporting students who learn differently or experience social anxiety. It is aimed to engage a broad range of students. We have also had the CEO Chris Varney present to our staff about delivering inclusive classrooms that allow all students to thrive. During Neurodiversity Week, Max Williams from the network spoke to our Year 5 and 6 students about autism and how they can find their own personal strengths. He also shared his personal story of having autism. He explained how finding out he had autism originally felt like an uncomfortable new pair of shoes. However, over time they become really comfortable and now they are his favourite item. These talks had a profound impact on our students who respectfully asked curious questions to learn more about autism.

We are now very excited to announce that they will be implementing an I CAN Parent Talk with the Glen Waverley PS parent community, over Zoom, on Monday 16 September from 7pm - 8pm. 

Kristie Murden will be presenting this talk covering a range of topics including understanding Autism from a lived perspective, creating/supporting positive relationships between families (especially including the neuro divergent child), their school & therapists and lots of information about organisations that families can turn for neuro affirming support.

If you would like more information please see a link to CEO, Chris Varney’s, TEDx Melbourne talk. Chris’ talk highlights everything at the core of the I CAN Network.

Autism: How My Unstoppable Mother Proved Experts Wrong – TEDxMelbourne

I will share the Zoom Link closer to the date but if you have any further questions, please feel free to email me at Daniel.addison@education.vic.gov.au.

Reflection Sheets

As part of our whole school approach to student wellbeing, we acknowledge that students sometimes need reminding and support to learn socially acceptable behaviours in all school contexts. We are therefore trialling our ‘Making Better Choices’ approach throughout Term Three to teach the students to reflect on behaviours to ensure they continue to learn positive social behaviours. At times, students will fill out a reflection sheet where they will consider what they could do differently to reach a more positive outcome when dealing with negative emotions. It is important that students come home after these situations and have a reflective conversation with a trusted adult to ensure they feel better equipped to deal with these situations in the future. 

A reflection sheet will be sent home so that parents can be aware of the situation and support their children in coping with these moments of concern. We appreciate all the support you all give to your children, and we are proud of the way they reflect, forgive, learn and move on from moments of sadness, angst or worry.

If you have any feedback regarding this process or if you have any further questions, please feel free to email me at Daniel.addison@education.vic.gov.au.