Mission and Wellbeing (AP)

Each week in the Pastoral Care lesson, the students undertake activities around the key principles of Gratitude, Empathy, Mindfulness (GEM) and Emotional Literacy to build resilience. Below is an activity that considers empathy as a family. 

Empathy

Working on empathy helps us to identify, understand and feel what another person is feeling. When we show empathy or we do something kind for someone else our brain releases oxytocin. This leads to increasing our self-esteem/confidence, energy levels, positivity and overall happiness.

Whole Family Activity: Neighbourhood Kindness Challenge

As a family, choose an act of kindness from the list below that you would like to do for a neighbour or family friend. Each family member can select one to commit to, or you can choose to do one together.

• Cook them something delicious like a cake, hotbread, or cookies.

Write a note to put in their letter box thanking them for being a great neighbour or friend.

• Design them a Thank You card
• Pick or buy some flowers to deliver to them
• Choose a little plant from your garden to give them
• Make them a gift from things around your house
• Offer to do a job for them, like wash their car or water their garden
• Offer to take their pets for a walk
• Invite them over for afternoon tea
• Invite them on a walk
• Recommend one of your favourite books to borrow and read
• Ask them if they need anything from the shops next time you buy groceries
• Say hello next time you see them, and ask them how their day is going
• Feel free to do more than one and spread the kindness even further
• Report back to each other in one week and share how your acts of kindness were received, and how doing them made you feel

Family Habit Builder:

Every night at dinner, have each person thank another family member for something they’ve done or said today, or give another family member a compliment.

Delivered by experts at Butterfly Foundation, this free 75-minute webinar aimed at parents of teens will teach you practical strategies for reducing the focus on appearance and body comparisons, increasing self-compassion and body appreciation, supporting healthy attitudes towards eating and movement in teens, responding to negative self-talk and appearance-related teasing, and what to do if you are concerned.

Date: 17th September 2024

Time: 7pm – 8.15pm (AEDT), plus questions

Register: Via Zoom (time-limited recording available) HERE

eSafety - Parent and Carer support

eSafety has a dedicated Parents section with resources and advice to help parents and carers with online safety issues and strategies to support their child. Some resources include:

Cyberbullying guide: This page helps parents and carers understand how they can help their child if they are being bullied. You can also download and print our cyberbullying quick guide, which has key information and advice, as well as help in Easy Read formats for people with low literacy or intellectual or cognitive disability.

Online Safety for Every Family: These resources include short videos and easy-to-read advice sheets to encourage parents and carers to start and continue conversations with their children about online safety. They include tips about how to stay safe online and important information about what to do if something bad happens online. The resources are available in more than ten languages.

Webinars: These live webinars give parents and carers the knowledge, skills, and tools to support their children to have safe online experiences.

Lovebites 

This week students in Year 9 have been engaged in the Love Bites program. The program, developed by NAPCAN (National Association for Prevention of Child abuse and Neglect) is a Respectful Relationships Education Program for young people, aims to provide young people with a safe environment to examine, discuss and explore respectful relationships. All Love Bites programming takes a strength-based approach and views young people as active participants who are able to make choices for themselves and their relationships when supported with information and opportunity for skill development. 

The overall aims of the programming are to equip young people with the knowledge needed to have respectful relationships, encourage and develop their critical thinking skills, and assist them in problem-solving and communicating effectively. 

The students were engaged in age-specific workshops, where students explored themes such as gender expectations and relationships, responding to jealous feelings, love and control, warning signs of a controlling/abusive relationship, supporting friends, seeking help and breaking up with respect. 

With each of these themes, students were able to communicate about behaviour that was acceptable and what behaviour ‘crosses the line’. These conversations gave students an understanding of how we respect each other's boundaries. 

RUOK Day 

Ask R U OK? Any Day because life happens every day. 

A lot can happen in a year, a month, a week. Whether it’s your friend, family member, colleague, partner, or teammate, the people you care about go through life’s ups and downs every day

Regular, meaningful conversations with the people close to you can help prevent small things from becoming big things. By checking in regularly, you build trust and normalise talking about what’s really going on, so when the people in your world find themselves struggling, they know you’re someone they can talk to.

R U OK? Day will be acknowledged at the College on September 12. Students can wear a yellow accessory on this day as part of their College uniform to highlight and celebrate the day.   Ask R U OK? any day of the year, because a conversation can change your life. Register to download the free resources.

Kathy Warby