The Resilience Project
Melbourne Girls' College
Students across year 7-10 have been working through their Resilience Project journals all year. Exploring the principals of GEM (Gratitude, Empathy and Mindfulness) and Emotional Literacy. Additionally, this month we had a few lucky staff attend The Resilience Project Teacher Seminar – to learn more about the principles to take into all classrooms, staffrooms and their lives.
EMPATHY @ Year 7 & 8
Year 7’s started the term by creating a kindness bunting, with acts of Kindness that could be acted out in different settings, these are being displayed in the year 7 classrooms.
Year 8’s put their feet in someone else’s shoes, they looked at videos to see other people's perspectives and views. Uncovering the challenges faced when trying to see someone else’s point of view.
Empathy Family Habit Builder:
Every night at dinner, have each person thank another family member for something they’ve done or said today, or give another family member a compliment.
MINDFULNESS @ Year 9 and 10
Year 9’s enjoyed exploring Mindfulness through mindful eating activities, using different senses to guess foods and take their time eating food to recognise new aspects of that food in a mindful experience.
Year 10’s worked through a series of mindfulness activities, which were focused around calming the chaos. This included a mindfulness scavenger hunt, origami and breathing exercises. Enabling students to be present in the moment and with their thoughts.
Mindfulness takes practice and there are many ways to practice it, giving students exposure to a wide variety of ways that they can use in their own time too.
Mindfulness Family Habit Builder:
Each night at dinner, ask everyone to take one mouthful of food more mindfully than the rest and think about the flavours they can taste and how it makes them feel. (They can also thank the chef!).
There are plenty of ways you can incorporate the GEM principles at home, check out this link that takes you through each concept and has activities to complete at home.
Another useful link it to
it is filled with videos, podcasts etc. for not only your child’s wellbeing but also for adults/parents too.