Author: Mrs Taylor

For this half term we return to the SEAL theme of Good to be me! The theme was launched with a whole-school assembly on Wednesday 02 March – ask your child to describe the story of the mouse and how she changed during the course of the adventure.  Our first weekly statement is ‘I can do something to make me feel proud.’

The SEAL theme Good to be me focuses on three main areas of learning:

• Self-awareness – feeling good about yourself, taking risks.
• Managing Feelings – understanding feelings, and why and how they lead us to behave the way we do – particularly the feelings of being excited, proud, surprised, hopeful, disappointed, worried and anxious and standing up for yourself –assertiveness skills, standing up for your views.
• Empathy

This theme explores feelings in the context of the child as an individual, developing self-awareness and helping the child to realise that it really is ‘Good to be me’. The theme is about understanding our feelings as well as considering our strengths and weaknesses as learners.

The key ideas and concepts behind this theme are:

Building emotional resilience

Children need to become resilient if they are to be healthy and effective life-long learners.

Coping with anxiety and worrying

Worry and anxiety are major features in many children’s lives. Many children have good reasons to be anxious. Exploring worries is important.

Calming down

Although getting stressed, anxious or angry are important and useful emotions, sometimes these feelings can be overwhelming.

Assertiveness

The theme encourages children to become assertive – that is, able to recognise and stand up for their rights while recognising and respecting the rights of others.

Understanding feelings and how they influence behaviour

The theme explores the relationship between ‘thinking’ and ‘feeling’ and the way each impacts on our behaviour. It looks at Flight or Fight rapid response to situations of threat and our responses to feeling threatened /under stress.

Reflection is the last of our 7 Rs of learning and this week’s statement is ‘I can reflect on my learning.’

Self-reflection is something we always encourage the children to do whether it is during lessons to understand their next steps or after their work has been marked to understand, and learn from, any mistakes.

This week Key Stage 2 children will be ‘reflecting’ on their 7 Rs of learning and some children will be working with Mr Roundtree to reflect on certain areas of learning through pupil interviews.

Next half term, we’ll be returning to the SEAL theme Good to be me.

The next of our 7 Rs for learning is remembering and this week ‘I can remember what I learn’ is the weekly statement.

By remembering what you learn you can apply your learning in different lessons.

‘I can be responsive’ is the SEAL statement for this week. 

Listening skills can play a key role in how responsive children are to peers and adults in school. 

A good listener always:

• looks at the speaker
• asks appropriate questions
• answers correctly to show they are listening
• doesn’t interrupt the speaker

The Great Swapathon is a new initiative from Change4Life and aims to give families tips, help and advice to encourage healthier lifestyles in an effort to deliver one million swaps across England.

Whether you swap fizzy drinks for pure fruit juice, swap snacking on a bag of crisps for a handful of fresh or dried fruit or swap four wheels for two feet there are simple swaps that everyone could try.

Today all children have received information about the campaign and will complete Talk Time homework to show how they can make a healthy swap.  We do have some spare voucher books if you would like more or to pass them on to others.  Please ask at the office.

 The Change4Life website includes a useful new tool to help people find more personalised swaps and also recipes for meals and healthier alternatives to favourite snacks.

 Our Packed Lunch guidance, launched last term, also includes lots of ideas for healthy swaps including:

• swapping white bread for wholegrain and other carbohydrates such as pasta
• swapping sweetened drinks for water provided at lunchtime
• swapping unhealthy snacks every day to once a week. 

We would encourage children who bring a packed lunch to school to consider a swap they could make to their packed lunch.  The Packed Lunch guidance is available from the office or in the Find Out section (meal).

 It would be great to hear about your swaps and more importantly if you have managed to stick to them!

We are currently reviewing our Food in School policy and would welcome parents’ / carers’ views on ‘treats’ brought in for birthdays.

Within school we recognise that providing treats can create pressure amongst parents / carers, reduce teaching time, create problems with allergies and create litter.

A number of parents /carers have given their views to Mrs Taylor before school today in the playground.  However, if you have any views on this and whether we should ban or discourage birthday treats please contact Mrs Taylor via the office.