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?

Learning about and practising kindness

Strength Practising

In Autahi we have been spending some time unpacking the strength of kindness and thinking about ways in which we can show kindness.  Like anything else, we need to practise strengths.  We can also start to spot strengths in others once we know what that strength looks like.  

We read the book Have You Filled a Bucket Today.  This book describes everyone as having an invisible bucket that you can either dip into or fill up.  When we do things for other people we fill up their buckets and that, in return, usually fills up our own as well.  Then we got thinking about ways we can fill others' buckets.  We created our own poster illustrating those ways.  

"When new kids start I can say, wanna play with me? They will say ok!"

"Even if someone is mean, you just smile at them and eventually they will smile back!"

After creating our poster and coming up with our ideas.  We decided to do some Random Acts of Kindness.  We each picked a name of a classmate out of a hat and then we made that person a fruit skewer.   

At the end of the day we exchanged our gifts and practised saying something nice.  Many of us said, "Thank you for being my classmate!" In this act we were working within the Positive Purpose domain of Positive Education in which we were thinking about someone other than ourself and doing something nice for that person.  We filled each other's buckets with kind words and a nice fruity treat at the end of the day.  Doing something nice for someone else, filled our own bucket too. 

Now we are working on continuing to practise kindness and notice and be grateful for kindness we see in others.  Can you try and spot kindness? Tell the person when you see it!

Strengths and Positive Emotion is Autahi

Positive Emotions

One part of the Positive Education model is Positive Emotions.  

The research of professor Barbara Fredrickson is all around a theory known as the "broaden and build theory," in which she studies the importance and effect of building on positive emotion.  She explains that, "Fostering positive emotions is not just about feeling good. Fredrickson and others suggest that the purpose of positive emotions is to broaden and build our point of view which allows us to think and act in more flexible ways. Research tells us that when people experience positive emotions they are more creative, resilient, trusting and tolerant of individual differences in others." (Positive Emotions are Contagious, by Dr. Georgiana Cameron, Institute of Positive Education)

In thinking about this one thing we have been doing in class is identifying our individual strengths, our strengths as a class, and looking at noticing and acknowledging each other's strengths.  

One way we've been exploring positive emotions and strengths: We identified 8 different strengths that we thought were important and we were each able to choose the 3 that we thought were our top.  We created a bar graph looking at our strengths. 

As a class our top three strengths are: Not giving up, being patient and looking after our things well.  

Another way we have been working on the broaden and build theory is by identifying personal strengths. We created our own self portraits looking carefully at our face shapes, skin tones, eye colours and all the other details.  Then as a class we discussed the things we think we are really good at and we have put them up with our portraits. 

When we begin to set our goals it will be fantastic to work from points of strength and to recognise that the things we are good at now, we may not always have been good at!