The Present

Imagine a puppy teaching you resilience. 

 A disabled boy spends his day playing violent games in a dark room. 

His mother brings him a present. 

Watch the rest here : 

Thoughts from our children:

The little puppy played around and whenever he stumbled he got up again. 

The little puppy did not give up on the boy when he tossed him away. He kept on pursuing him until he gave in. 

The puppy taught the boy a new side to life, being outside in the garden, in the sun, and throwing a ball instead of throwing weapons in a computer game. 

Puppy has three legs, but he still plays around as if he has four. He shows the boy that you can still be happy and live life to the full even if you face difficulties in life. 

Here is the original comic strip on which the animated short was based.  Click on the picture so you can enlarge it. 

How big is your problem?

This week we are doing lessons on resilience. 

Sometimes we need to put our problems into perspective. 

How big is a problem, really? 

We invented a problem scale. Each child had a set of five lollies with numbers on them.

Problem number 1: A glitch, something that usually solves itself. 

Problem number 2: A small problem which you can solve yourself. 

Problem number 3: A problem for which you need some help from others. 

Problem number 4: A problem for which you need a lot of help. 

Problem number 5: An emergency. Something that can be helped with some difficulty, if at all. Sometimes we need to learn to live with a number 5. 

We read a lot of different scenarios, and discussed how big each problem is. Dealing with the small problems ourselves helps us face the bigger problems better. That is resilience. 

Resilience

This week we taught hard about teaching a new word to our children, but as always, they surprised us. They learnt what resilience is fast, and many of them showed strong traits of resilience themselves. We tried to demonstrate this by getting the children to build a large tower made of paper cups. They had to work together, work gently and whenever the tower accidentally fell down, they had to start over again. Giving up was not an option, but finding solutions on how to make the tower not fall down was the rule of the game. 

Here are two photos from this lesson.