The glass is half full at Hooke House
Our twice-weekly Peer Support groups at Hooke House - led by our wonderful Year 6 students - have been focusing on optimism and resilience, giving our older students an opportunity to guide the younger girls.
Optimism and resilience are important skills in life. Our girls must be able to persevere through setbacks, take on challenges, and risk making mistakes to reach a goal. They must be able to adapt to the world around them, looking for solutions and staying positive when things don’t go their way. Last term, students focused on optimism in Peer Support groups on Tuesdays and resilience during their Thursday groups.
“The learning has been very rich for the girls,” says Year 6 teacher, Mrs Froggatt. “The goal has been to assist the girls to understand that both positive and negative emotions help us make decisions about the choices we make and the ways we behave. We have explored the ways negative emotions can give rise to self-defeating and harmful thoughts and actions. Students have been reflecting on ways that they can calm down when they are faced with challenges and difficult situations. They have discovered they can pause and think about what is happening around them, reflect on how they are thinking about that situation (maybe an assessment that concerns them or a disagreement with a friend) and how their thoughts impact the way they feel then act.”
The girls have enjoyed working together in a supportive and respectful environment.
Zali (Year 6) said, “’When we didn’t think of solutions, there were some strategies we could use to create a new solution. There was always a way around a problem. When we thought of new solutions, I felt happy that we had ways to get around them.”
Mrs Frogatt is proud of the way in which the students have developed positive habits of mind. “They have developed a variety of skills and coping methods to develop emotional resilience, including self-monitoring their emotions using the emotional thermometer, using mindful meditations, keeping things in perspective and using positive self-talk.”
The Peer Support program helps to create strong friendships within and across year groups, enabling girls to come together on an equal basis to share their thoughts, listen to each other’s ideas and work collaboratively to tackle issues.
Lucy and Mali (Year 6) said, “We learnt about our feelings, how we should react to certain subjects, how to control our emotions and how we can look at situations differently. It was great because we were able to brainstorm our own ideas in our own groups and explore our own different emotions. It also let us see there is always a different side to every story. The upside is we get to share our emotions and how we feel and not have the feeling of being judged. It is also good to teach the new generation these strategies because bullying is becoming much more common and this teaches us how we can avoid certain situations, how we can regulate our emotions and how we can share how we feel.”
It’s easy to become so caught up in day-to-day activities that we forget to develop positive habits that can make the difference between having an okay day and an upbeat, positive day. Mrs Froggatt is delighted with the girls’ progress so far. “It has been a joy to witness their engagement with these lessons.”