Conrad Kelly - Mar 30, 2022

Kia ora tātou

Last Friday our staff team took part in an online development day with teachers from all the nine member schools of our Kāhui Ako. The focus of the day was on how we can support our children as they practice learning how to deal with anxiety and develop resilience. Kathryn Berkett , was our keynote speaker and she shared a huge amount with us. A number of points resonated with me:

· Anxiety and stress are normal parts of our lives, social media appears to play a significant role in amplifying these, in our children.

· We need to provide opportunities for our children to practice developing resilience, we need to provide them with “multiple moments of tolerable stress”.

· Some of the ways we can safely practice moments of tolerable stress are; kapa haka, learning a musical instrument, sport, board games, mindfulness etc.

· At these times children are learning about; practising something until they can do it, learning to lose, learning to switch off, practising moving from tension to calm, learning to persevere, learning to make a mistake ….

One of the pieces of feedback that we received in our 2021 end-of-year survey was, that parents/caregivers aren’t sure of the types of activities we are doing at KNS to help develop children’s resilience. We will share examples of these with you in newsletters throughout the year.

Whakataukī o te wiki

· E kore te tangata e pakiri i runga i te wai marino – A person who remains in calm waters will never get strong

A thought to share with your children:

“If we only did things that were easy, we wouldn’t actually be learning anything. We’d just be practicing things we already knew.” (David Dockterman)

Ngā Mihi

Conrad Kelly

Principal