Back to School
September 14, 2020
Last week marked the start of a new school year, which means that it’s the start of a new and exciting time for the Isle Listen team to get stuck in with our school sessions.
We believe it is important that the community, including children and young people are equipped with skills and techniques to help them deal with any stressors, or things that make them feel nervous or anxious in their day to day life. This is more important than ever, with going back to school being different to previous years, and we were so excited to deliver this on an even bigger and better scale!
On Wednesday and Thursday of last week, our team were out in full force and we ran a variety of sessions across 3 different year groups within QEII. We ran PSHE lessons for Year 7 exploring change and the challenges moving from year 6 to year 7. In the sessions we discussed how our confidence comes from our preparation and the importance of talking openly and honestly whilst going through change to support their mental wellbeing.
With the Year 9’s we ran a new ‘quick fire’ style session in the school hall. We laid out 4 ‘stations’, each with a different coping strategy exercise set up on them. They had 8 minutes per station and moved through all 4, learning along the way an introduction to:
- Circle of Control: Aspects we can control vs aspects we cannot control.
- Progressive Muscle Relaxation (PMR): Getting your body physically relaxed by relieving tension.
- Redefining Mindfulness: Awareness!! Of yourself, surroundings, thoughts and feelings.
- Positive Journaling: Focusing on the positive in our lives to help boost our self-esteem.
We chose to do this because we know not everybody will cope with stress or feeling nervous or anxious in the same way, so the idea behind having 4 different strategies is that they may resonate with at least one of them and give them a go in their own time.
Last, but by no means least, we ran sessions for the new Year 12’s from Castle Rushen, Ramsey Grammar School and QEII on ‘Adulting’. This was focussed on the changes you go through in life and how to handle those transitions as best as possible. In these sessions they were presented with a range of difficult scenarios that they may come across and discussed how they might manage these to create the best possible outcome for all involved.
A huge thank you to everyone who took part in the sessions, it was great to see the teachers getting involved too! We had so much fun putting together and delivering these sessions and over the first 2 days of the new school year, we had an input with approximately 540 students, and we can’t wait to build on that over the coming year!
#backtoschool #backtoschool2020 #islelisten