New SEAL theme…Good to be me
Our new SEAL (Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning) theme for this half-term, 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.
As part of our current mini topic, What’s the matter?, children will also ask ‘What’s the matter?’ from a social and emotional point of view, understanding feelings and thinking about how they can solve problems.
The key ideas and concepts behind the theme of Good to be me 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.
‘I respond to difficult situations in a positive way’ is the first SEAL statement for this theme.
Bedtime reading
We like these top tips to promote bedtime reading from Book Trust.
Although these are specifically for children who are starting to read by themselves, there are plenty of tips to support children of all ages.
(The Book Trust’s advent calendar is brilliant, too!)
Shared area learning
Lots of learning happens in the shared area!
8Rs for learning
Resilience, resourcefulness, readiness, responsibility, risk-taking, responsiveness, remembering and …reflection.
This week we complete our 8Rs SEAL theme. Children will have the opportunity to not only reflect on their learning in general but also reflect on how the 8Rs supports their learning.
Talk with your child about what they’ve learnt, asking questions about how they learnt, why they learnt it, when they’ll use their learning, how they would teach this to someone else, what learning might link with what they’ve learnt today…
Can your child remember the 8Rs and the associated animal?
One of your 5 a day for free
Our weekly fruit tuck shop runs on a Tuesday playtime. It’s for Key Stage 2 children, with a charge of 20p per portion and a pre-payment option available.
Today, as part of health week, all children, including Reception and Key Stage 1, were invited to an extra tuck shop free of charge. This gave children who might not normally come to the tuck shop the chance to try it out.
It was great to see everyone enjoying a fruit-filled playtime.
Polished performance
This week is the final week of our Autumn term after-school clubs.
It was great to see so many parents come to watch the routine learnt by children attending the popular dance club led by Edward Lynch.
Edward has worked with class teachers in curriculum PE to develop their teaching of dance and his enthusiasm for this subject has certainly rubbed off on the children who attended this club.
- ‘It was an amazing club.”
- ‘I like dance even more now.’
Healthy packed lunches
As it is health week, copies of our Guide to Healthy Packed Lunches have been given out at lunchtime today as a reminder for children who choose to bring a packed lunch to school.
We encourage at least one piece of fruit or vegetable in packed lunches and snack items occasionally, as a treat, but aim for healthy options. Lots of learning has taken place in health week looking at quantities of sugar in drinks and the importance of drinking water to keep hydrated. We therefore encourage water which is freely available for packed lunch children.
There were also some prizes for healthy packed lunches.
Health week
We have had a brilliant week learning about how we can keep our bodies and minds healthy. Here are a few pictures of what we’ve been up to.
5-a-day
This morning, we worked with children from Y1 and Reception class thinking about what foods count toward your daily target of 5 portions of fruit and vegetables. We then tasted had time to taste some!
Read some good guidance about this.
It’s all about health
This week is the first themed week of the year and it’s all about health.
Over the week classes will work with different visitors to school including:
- d:side (drug education)
- Catering Leeds (food nutritionists)
- Leeds Force basketball
- Leeds City Council road safety team
- Tsukuru Judo Academy
- Leeds University dental students
- Rachel Frazer – Yoga teacher
- Heart Research UK
- Dr Natwar – Corner House dental surgery
- Claire Sparrow – pilates teacher
There will be lots of learning in class too – hand washing, body image, emotional health, 5 a day and much more. Keep an eye on our class news pages to find out more.
On Monday 23 November, 3:00-3:30pm, there will be an information session for parents, led by d:side, where you can find out more about the drug education sessions delivered to each class this week. No need to book – just come along.