18 September 2020

Post date: Sep 18, 2020 4:5:54 AM

On Monday, we welcomed new children/whānau to the school at the mihi whakatau. Kia kaha, kia maia, kia manawanui. Be brave, be brave, be steadfast - and what a great way to start Te Wiki o te Reo Māori. Māori Language Week. There has been a lot of great learning out there!

Some of you experienced the children running Positive Education workshops on Optimism a couple of weeks ago at the SLCs. I'm sure some of them were engaging those Character Strengths of Leadership, Bravery, Zest, Teamwork... possibly some hope... and more!

The shared language of Character Strengths is a valued feature of our school and, when I talk with teaching staff who are newer to the school, this is something they often talk about - the embedded nature of strengths. 'Strengths spotting' in others, understanding our strengths make us unique from others but together we can achieve great things!

When staff join our school they all undertake the VIA Character Strengths survey and also Strengths Profile (CAPP, UK) which provides some insight into performance, use and energy levels around pieces of work. Awareness of how often we use our 'top' strengths and setting out to deliberately plan for engaging them is one factor in increasing resilience. As a staff, we need to do the learn and live aspects - before we can successfully teach and eventually embed this science with the children in the aim of providing them with tools to take on their life's journey.

"Appreciation of Beauty and Excellence" is one of the Character Strengths I have deliberately been trying to focus on in the last couple of weeks, taking a moment to actually notice the things around me. How fortunate we are to live and work in such a beautiful, ever changing environment - totally enveloped in nature!

This Character Strength positively correlates with 'openness to experience, altruism, devotion to others/larger community and capacity for change'. Sounds pretty good to me, so I'm certainly going to try and keep being appreciative of what's around us!

Remember the beautiful illustrations our children and community developed a couple of years ago?

This is how they all fit together:

For more information on Character Strengths, watch the following video - A Universal Language that Describes What’s Best in Us by Ryan Niemiec.