Exercising our Gratitude Muscles

Gratitude is one of our Character Strengths. On our Character Strengths poster, it looks like this:

In our recent Positive Education lessons, Autahi has begun to explore what Gratitude means. We have begun by first noticing the things and people that we are thankful for. We will go on to find ways to turn our Gratitude into action.

Our classroom now has a Gratitude Jar.

This is a simple way to encourage us to notice and capture (in writing or a picture) the moments when we experience Gratitude. Here are some of the things we are thankful for.

Research has shown that noticing and cultivating feelings of Gratitude can improve our wellbeing and resilience.

In our Flourish model, Gratitude comes into the sphere of Positive Emotions. While we encourage our students to feel all of their feelings, it is important to learn the skill of cultivating Positive Emotions like Optimism, Appreciation of Beauty and Excellence and Gratitude. 

A daily practice of noticing the things in life that we are grateful for (they may be very small things!) helps to build our resilience and ability to cope with life's challenges. Positive emotions broaden our attention, leading to more open and flexible thinking (rather than shutting down or flight responses to problems). This is also known as Broaden and Build Theory.

Recalling and revisiting moments that we are thankful for allows us to re-experience the positive emotion. This is important because, as humans, our brains are wired towards a negativity bias. We need to experience a lot more positives to outweigh a few negatives.

By teaching our students how to exercise their 'Gratitude muscles', we hope to help them to develop a habit of noticing positives. Capturing things we are grateful for in a picture or a diary gives us the opportunity to revisit the experience - and reinforce the positive emotion. Doing this as a group makes this even more powerful.

You might like to try this at home, too. Start by asking each other on the way home, "What are you feeling thankful for today?"

And if you would like to know more about Broaden and Build Theory, our Flourish model, or any other aspect of our Positive Education programme, please chat with Beth or Carl.

Ha-pea-ness!

 

At last, the first of the Autahi peas are ready to eat!

We have been dialling up our Patience since we planted the seeds during Rising 5s at the end of August...

In mid-September we noticed that they were sprouting. Exciting!

We've tried to take care of them, with regular watering. They grew amazingly fast.

Now the pods are getting fat and ready to pick. We feel like cham-pea-on pea growers!

It's fun trying to discover where the peas are hiding on the plants. All the pods are ap-pea-ling, but we're trying to pick only the fat ones. That way, the others have time to grow a bit more before we eat them.

No need for a reci-pea: our peas never get as far as the kitchen. After all, what could be nicer than popping open a freshly-picked pod and gobbling up all the little, green peas inside? This is a new experience for some - but we're hoping that all our Autahi students will give peas a chance.

And our hardcore pea fans will hap-pea-ly munch through those sweet, pea-flavoured pods, too.

Peas are a wonderful, seasonal delicacy to share with children. We firmly believe that these are the experiences that are part of living our 'flourish' model for Positive Education, connecting us to positive accomplishment, engagement, emotions and health.

And watch out: there are beans on the way, too!

Strengths

 

Research shows that character strengths can help children succeed at school and in life. Strengths are the positive qualities individuals have, as reflected in their thoughts, feelings, and actions. They promote the well-being of themselves and others. 

Have a watch of our latest little vignette - this time an introduction to Character Strengths 

Kia ora #4

Art Recreations

Even though we can't visit Museums and Art Galleries at the moment, we can still enjoy the art in other ways. People across the world have been recreating famous paintings. If you would like to add to our Art Gallery, please post your recreations to the Padlet below.

Kia Ora #3

Monday Morning Message from Jude

Kia ora 3

Kia ora 2 from Jude

Link to: Kia ora 2 from Jude

Inquiry Learning Parent Workshop

On 4th April, we held a parent workshop on Inquiry Learning.

Purpose of workshops:

• to show that Inquiry is authentic and is about deep thinking

• to unpack the Inquiry process

• to encourage conversations about learning to continue at home.

Strengths Hunt

You have heard lots about us focussing on different character strengths, unpacking them and trying to spot when we are using them.

As a brief introduction to all of the strengths we spent the afternoons last week on a Strength Hunt around the school, looking for our different visuals that are hidden throughout.  

We spent some time unpacking the strengths and what they meant, we got our clipboards and detective eyes on and went searching.  We used teamwork as we searched and certainly enjoyed a bit of appreciation of beauty and excellence! 

Leadership

Kindness

Teamwork

Love

Social Intelligence

Judgement 

Those were just a few that we found of the 24 hidden around the school.  We know that words become worlds.  The language we use, becomes the attitudes we have, which effects the actions we take.  We are choosing to see and speak strengths language.  Help us by spotting when we are using these strengths!

Can you find all 24?

Perseverance

This week we have had a focus on the strength of perseverance. Sometimes we try things that are a bit tricky and it can be easy to write something off as too hard. By practising things we help to grow our brain and get a little better every time we attempt it. To show this in Autahi we put out lots of perseverance challenges for us to try and keep trying all week.
We celebrated giving things a go and challenging ourselves to keep going even when it seemed too hard. The feeling of joy when you finally get something is what it is all about and reminds us of how hard we worked to get there.

Check us out as we attempted some challenges...

Balancing can be tricky especially on a wobble board. We practised perseverance by trying and learning each time we wobbled off. Some of us mastered the board with two feet and challenged ourselves a bit further by trying one foot.


We did a bit of sorting. Only we couldn't use our hands and had to use tweezers instead. It was challenging trying to pick things up, especially the glass beads. The learners in Autahi persevered though and found lots of different ways to meet this challenge.




Building a card tower is pretty tricky. It takes lots of creativity and perseverance to even build the first part. We have been having lots of fun trying different ideas and even when it falls down we just pick it back up and start again.




Skipping is another of our perseverance challenges. We are having lots of fun trying to work out the best way to skip.

There are so many other ways we can practise perseverance. Have a go at home and see what you can come up with and share your ideas with us.

Reflecting on goals

This week we looked back on an amazing Arts Celebration. Before we begun down the pathway of creating a show we set some goals about the upcoming show. We talked a lot about the feelings we might have like nervousness or excitement and what we could do to help us achieve the outcomes we wanted. Here are some examples:

Bravery and overcoming fear was a goal shared by many. Others made goals about learning and remembering the different moves they needed to do. We approached the show with a growth mindset, that there were things that we couldn't do yet but with lots of practise we knew we could achieve our goals.

So we practised and we practised and then we practised some more. We used teamwork to learn and guide each other. We took turns listening to the ideas of others. We had to work hard.

But then something amazing happened...

A show started to come together.

And now that the show is done we looked back at what we had achieved and celebrated meeting our goals. Here are some examples of the writing we did today about achieving our goals: 

Wet lunch

Sometimes it rains at Worser Bay School but we don't let that get in the way of us having a great time. We are really fortunate in Autahi to have some amazing big buddies who come and join us on wet days. The big buddies from Monday wrote a short story about there time in Autahi that I thought would be great to share with everyone.

It's great to have an outside perspective in the classroom, especially when they are so caring and dedicated to making sure we all feel welcome and safe. When reading this piece try and think about some of the ways they are harnessing positive relationships and modelling how we can positively interact with one another even during a tough time like a wet break time.

Today at Morning Tea it was very rainy, so we went up to Autahi and played with them.

Megan and Chris played a game of HEADS DOWN, THUMBS UP and the Megan kept getting picked!

Joni and Greta played a medical game with some of the little kids. All of the kids used their imagination. We had fun pretending to be little pets and humans. There were quite a few cats, and two horses!

We are growing our Leadership by helping the juniors and by spending time with the youngest kids in the school we are practicing our patience. Because younger kids have a fresh imagination, you never know what they are going to do so it requires lots of patience!

We are learning how to work WITH the little kids rather than bossing them around. We liked watching the kids play and understand things about their personalities and anything really about them.

We enjoyed just going down there and getting to see the classroom where we started off at school.

By Greta, Chris, Joni and Megan

We really cherish the ability to grow the connections between our seniors and the learners in Autahi. It helps us to focus on developing social and emotional skills that help to nurture relationships with themselves and others.

We can't wait for the next rainy day so that we can spend more time with our awesome big buddies.

Mindful activities

Mindfulness activities

For the last few weeks we have been exploring different activities to practise mindfulness. We have been spending some time on Tuesday mornings with our buddies in Tautoru to have a go at finger knitting, beading, yoga and colouring. 

Check us out trying some of the activities...

Here we are working together with a buddy to add beads to a piece of string. We practised our fine motor skills as well as learning how to work together.

Colouring can be a great way to relax. The colouring craze of the last few years came about as people became more aware of the benefits to our psychological health. A great stress reliever as well as lots of fun.

Count us in!

We also explored finger knitting. I find this to be a great way 

to relax and it only took me 3 weeks to learn (the kids got it in about 3 minutes)

Everyone has their own way to practise mindfulness. Whether it be taking a quiet walk or reading a book, it is all good for us. Have a talk at home about what you find relaxing and share your ideas.