The Stars Peer Mentors had a thought-provoking start to the term with some more leadership and wellbeing training to kickstart Term 2!

As part of our ongoing leadership training, we had a half-day intensive workshop around ‘Te Whare Tapa Whā’ and the pillars of wellbeing. Te Whare Tapa Whā is a model designed to explain the different aspects making up wellbeing and was developed by Sir Mason Durie. The four pillars of Hauora | Wellbeing are:

• taha tinana - physical
• taha hinengaro – mental and emotional
• taha wairua - spiritual
• taha whānau – family and social

With its four walls, the whare | house is a symbol of these four pillars. And are all underpinned by whenua | land - where you come from, your roots.

We are learning that by nurturing and strengthening all pillars, we support our health and wellbeing. If something in our life is challenging the wellbeing of one wall or pillar, we can draw on the foundation and other walls until we can strengthen that wall again. And to build resilience for the tough times, we can explore our way to wellbeing by choosing one small step at a time to strengthen one of our pillars. It’s a bit like ‘getting our house in order’, as the saying goes.

To learn more about this we worked through a series of discussions and hands-on activities to learn more about each of the pillars. Over the course of the workshop, we identified our own key values we live by and how we can incorporate them into our everyday lives.

We dived into learning more about the different parts of the brain and how it functions, to make sense of our mental and emotional wellbeing. We also looked at how we can change our mindset of our inner voice so we don’t feed the “grey wolf” as much. Mentors also got tips on how to improve our sleep and physical wellbeing through movement. We discussed the importance of healthy relationships and how we can recognize ‘red flags’ and nurture the green flags.

Lastly, we talked about the importance of knowing where we come from and recognising that we are a very diverse country and everyone comes from different backgrounds and cultures. Learning to accept everyone for who they are and learn more about where they come from, means we can know how to support each other more.

All of this helps our own wellbeing, and means we have even more tools to support our Year 9s and help them on their wellbeing journey.

We also had a great Celebration Assembly last week! Our Celebration Assembly is a chance to recognise the outstanding start we had in Stars in Term 1, and to recognise some students who have been seen demonstrating the three school values - manaakitanga, kotahitanga and whanaungatanga - in Stars. Our Peer Mentors also got recognised for our dedication to being a Stars Peer Mentor, and received our Peer Mentor badges.

Bring on Term 2!