Showing posts with label character strengths. Show all posts
Showing posts with label character strengths. Show all posts

Sunday 15 May 2022

Strengths

 
Research shows that character strengths can help children succeed at school and in life. Strengths are the positive qualities individuals have, as reflected in their thoughts, feelings, and actions. They promote the well-being of themselves and others. 

Have a watch of our latest little vignette - this time an introduction to Character Strengths 



Wednesday 20 March 2019

Being a Goal Setter and using Character Strengths

Our Learner Attribute for this term is I am a goal setter. We've spent time thinking about where we would like to take our learning next and what we will practise to get there. Reaching a goal involves practising specific skills like writing more sentences to write longer stories, but we also thought about what character strengths might help us. We often talk about how character strengths are like superpowers that we can use to help us achieve our goals.

Some of us have been using rākau music patterns as a Wake Up Your Brain activity and we wanted to challenge ourselves and perform at our school assembly. This was going to be a real challenge because we only had 3 sessions to get the item ready! What character strengths might we need?

Teamwork would be useful because we were working as a group and had to collaborate and share ideas, as well as contribute- everyone had to do it! Bravery would be very useful because we were performing in front of the whole school! Love of learning would also come in handy. We spent extra time practising at lunchtimes and some of us even took rākau home to practise because we were challenging ourselves to do even trickier moves with the rākau. Some people also used their Judgement because we had to think carefully and choose the challenge level that was best for each of us. Leadership helped us to understand that even if I am not at the front I can also be a leader from the back and support my group by helping to keep the rhythm.

How did we feel afterwards?

Sasha- I felt proud and happy because I had done the performance and last year I was too scared to get on stage.
Anneke- I felt excited because I had never played rākau before.
Nicolas- I felt happy and brave because I had practised and I did it!
Darragh- I felt proud because I felt happy that I went up in front of the whole school.

Wednesday 4 July 2018

Matariki Celebrations: Weaving Stars with Shona and Nic


Today we worked in whanau groups and worked with different people across the school. We worked with different teachers too at different times of the day.


Nic and Shona Activities

We brainstormed the names of the stars and what each star is kaitiaki of. We were blown away by what the students already knew about the different stars.




We sang the Matariki song: 



Nga Tamariki O Matariki

Waitī, Waitā, Waipunarangi,

Tupu-ā-nuku, Tupu-ā-rangi, Ururangi e

Koinei ngā tamariki o Matariki

(These are the children of Matariki)

Ngā whetū e pīataata i te rangi e

(The bright stars that shine in the sky)

Ngā whetū e pīataata i te rangi e

(The bright stars that shine in the sky)


We worked with buddies to weave stars. We used wool and paper plates. We knew it would be tricky so we discussed what Character Strengths we could use to overcome these challenges. Some of the ideas were judgement, perspective, kindness, bravery, perseverance and zest.



We watched the beautiful story of the Seven Stars of Matariki read by the author, Toni Rolleston-Cummins:


Thursday 21 September 2017

Character Day with Wanwan and Gabrielle's whanau group



 Today we got into whanau groups to learn some more about character strengths. We created some plays showing different character strengths and others watching gave us feedback and told us what character strengths our plays had. Humour was a strength of everyone - come to assembly on Friday for an example.






We also watched this video about two frogs... can you work out what character strengths they were using?



Then, like the frogs, we also made butter from cream. Ask us how! Some groups used real perseverance because they were trying and trying with milk instead of cream!!

Lastly we made up our own games especially focused on one or two of the character strengths. It was a fin day together.


Character day.
Today was character day and we did all sorts of fun activities in our whanau group which in case you don't know is a group with our siblings and some people from a Autahi, tautoru, mahutonga and matariki. My whanau group made butter from cream and we made up our own games and demonstrated how to play the games we made up and the last thing we did was make up our own plays.
By Nela

today was really fun we got jars fulled of cream all of us shakes the jars into butter. I loved it when one-one gone and PRANKED US!!! filling some of the jars with milk instead of cream it was cool and annoying we did this in groups of course my group was one of the pranked groups!
By Ruby

today we had whanau day and we got into our groups and what we did was we made cream and also ate it, we made our own games and we played splash.I learnt that it is really hard to make up your own games.
By Cruz

Wednesday 28 June 2017

Celebrating Matariki and Appreciation of Beauty and Excellence Day; Gabrielle and Wanwan's whanau group



We had a very enjoyable day working with everyone. A real highlight was Stan joining us, sponsored by Asia New Zealand, who introduced the children to Chinese painting. He showed them how to paint pandas and birds with a brush and black ink, adding more detail as appropriate.


We also talked about, and appreciated, what people and things were special to us. For many it was pets, family or friends.


We found special leaves and shared what we found beautiful about them, then made our own pictures from groups of leaves. Some of us did a little yoga. We also made stars as collaborative origami pieces to celebrate Matariki. We also had a few student workshops run by people sharing a skill that they had some excellence in. To finish we learned a waiata about Matariki and some of us made videos about what we learned.


Thanks to our parent helpers and friends for sharing the day with us.









Monday 26 June 2017

Matariki: Appreciation of Beauty and Excellence Nic and Scott's Group

Appreciation of Beauty and Excellence Defined. Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman,the developers of the personal strengths classification, define the appreciation of beauty and goodness as “the ability to find, recognize, and take pleasure in the existence of goodness in the physical and social worlds.”
Today we had a focus on the character strength of Appreciation of Beauty and Excellence. We worked across the school in Whanau groups. 
Kyla (Solly's mum) worked with students to make Maro for Matariki.

We took photos of  things that we think are beautiful from around the school. We made these into a collage. You can see this next week at our Arts Celebration. Please make sure that you visit all of the spaces in the school to look at all of the wonderful learning that we have been doing.



We also created a piece of found material art inspired by Andy Goldsworthy.



We also loved the opportunity to work with the artist Stan Chan.