The Resilience Project
Introducing The Resilience Project
Rachael Gemmill, Early Childhood Teacher
It is with great excitement that we can announce our partnership this year with The Resilience Project as part of our School Readiness Funding for 4YO kindergarten.
The Resilience Project (TRP) delivers emotionally engaging programs providing practical, evidence-based mental health strategies to build resilience and happiness. They have worked with elite sporting clubs and athletes, businesses and are now in over 1000 schools.
For the first time TRP team are now delivering their program in early childhood education settings. You can read more about the project and the objectives of the program here: https://theresilienceproject.com.au/early-years/
We believe TRP fits perfectly with our philosophy at GEKA which focuses on the 4 pillars of the program - Gratitude, Empathy and Mindfulness while also explicitly teaching Emotional Literacy within a play based program. We will all come to know this as GEM over the coming weeks.
Did you know
• 1 in 4 adolescents have a mental illness
• 1 in 7 primary schools kids have a mental illness
• 1 in 5 adults will experience mental ill-health throughout the year
• 65% of adolescents do not seek help for mental illness
The reason we chose to partner with TRP is that the curriculum has been shown to provide a number of short and long-term benefits for children, families and early learning services, including:
• Building resilience in children from an early age
• Developing ability to identify, communicate and manage their emotions and emotions in others
• Helping them to feel happier and improve their overall wellbeing
• Providing young people with the skills and tools to help them thrive at school and in their personal lives
• Strengthening family and early learning centre relationships
• Encouraging families to build positive and strong connections.
Each week at kindergarten the children will be engaged in learning experiences that support their strong sense of wellbeing.
In addition to this each child enrolled in a 4YO group will have also received their very own FAMILY JOURNAL (provided to families at the end of term 2). This includes prompts for daily/weekly reflections and suggested activities that you can do as a family.
We know our families have many different commitments so this is about building some quick practices into your daily routine that are manageable. You are your child’s first and most important teacher which is another reason The Resilience Project Early Years Program is so appealing as it connects family and the kindergarten program.
Launch Week - end of term 2.
We have been so excited by the overwhelmingly positive response of educators and families to our partnership with The Resilience Project and, during a week of very wild weather in Melbourne, I think we can be all grateful for having such beautiful and safe places to live, play and learn.
Week 1 kicked off with a focus on emotional literacy with educators reading stories such as ‘In My Heart – A Book of Feelings’ by Jo Witek and ‘The Colour Monster’ by Anna Llenas and engaging with play based learning experiences that support children to label their emotions, recognise facial features associated with different feelings and experiment with using colour as a way to communicate emotional states.
GEKA Carnegie Kindergarten
GEKA Glover Street Kindergarten
GEKA Sacred Heart Kindergarten
