We asked girls how they feel when they’re not at GFS. Less than half of girls feel like they can always deal with problems, be brave and talk about their feelings.
In fact, 12% of girls feel like they can never talk about their feelings.
So, because we want to support girls in areas where they need it most, we’ve decided to spotlight resilience for the first term of the 2022-23 school year.
Moving forward, we’ll have themes each term based on what girls told us they need.
That doesn’t mean we’re putting a firm structure in place – our volunteers have great ideas to share with their girls and we don’t want to put an end to that. The programme we supply is just a way to give them a few sessions designed to focus on the things girls told us they need more support with.
Autumn term 2022 overview
The four resilience sessions that girls will take part in will be spread out over the term and introduce ideas and tools bit by bit. Here’s a summary of the goals for each session and what we hope girls will get out of them:
While the sessions may seem serious, our programme team and volunteers are excellent at making important topics fun and engaging for girls of all ages. Here’s an example of one of the activities in the programme and how we’re making resilience fun and relevant!
The Resilience Game!
We start by asking the group to stand in a line along the back of the room.
Then, we’ll read out a number of statements, choosing the ones that feel most relevant to the girls at the group.
For each statement girls choose one of the given answers and move forward the number of steps associated to the statement.
The people at the front have answered using more ‘resilient’ responses – doing things like asking for help and practicing skills has helped them to take bigger steps forward than going it alone and hoping for the best. There are no winners or losers in this game, just differences and that’s okay!
Girls will learn that this can apply to life too.
We’ll introduce the topic of resilience as “the ability to ‘bounce back’ after challenges and tough times”.
For children, challenges and tough times include experiences like starting at a new school, changes in the family, moving house, or welcoming a sibling into the family.
With that explanation in mind, it sure sounds like the Autumn Term is the perfect time to look back at resilience with our girls, don’t you agree?
Leave a Reply