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. 

Qualities of a good friend

We are all different and we all have different good qualities. That's why we can be close friends with some children and not with others, because we look for different things in different people. 

What do you look for in a friend? 

Here is the worksheet we put in our journal this week.

Giving Compliments

One thing that friends do is compliment each other. 

Sometimes we find it easier to find what's wrong in other people than to compliment them. 

Giving a compliment is an easy way to start a conversation with someone. 

Here are some ideas that came out during one of our lessons.

Children wrote or drew compliments for each other on each other's journals.