Teamwork

Together we are strong, and that is why being part of a team is very important.
To work in a team, we need to:

• Listen carefully to what everyone has to say
• Speak up if you disagree
• Be respectful
• Do your share of the work

Remember: A stick breaks if it is alone. In a bundle, it will not. Just like the sticks in these photos.

Positive Discipline: How to apologise.

In our school, we practise positive discipline. We prefer you to make amends and fix your mistakes rather than put you in punishment. 

Here are things you can do when you break the rules. 

a) Say sorry. 

I'm sorry, I was wrong. Please forgive me. 

b) Fix the damage. 

Did you break a toy? Replace it. 

Did you scribble on the wall? Clean it. 

Did you hurt someone? Make up for it by helping them.

c) You can write it down. 

d) You can do a gesture that makes the other person feel better.

Whatever you do, do not be afraid to say sorry. 

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.