Celebrating Strengths by Jennifer Fox-Eades

Author:Jennifer Fox-Eades [Fox-Eades, Jennifer]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: CAPP Press
Published: 2010-10-18T16:00:00+00:00

PART THREE

The Festivals

NINE

Beginnings

ABEGINNINGS FESTIVAL is a way of setting the tone for the year to come, for clearly stating why you are all here and what you hope to achieve. It’s a basic point, but do your pupils know why they come to school? Do they know why education is important? Does anyone ever tell them, in words of one syllable? Why do you think education is important? The Beginnings Festival would be a good time to think and talk about this as a community. It is a time for laying down positive habits of thought, speech and behaviour that will, by the end of the year, have become ingrained and automatic.

An amazingly successful American teacher, Marva Collins, whose inner city black pupils go on to become lawyers, doctors and, above all, teachers, uses simple aphorisms which the children learn to chant back to her to extraordinary effect. ‘A rest from school is not a rest from what? She asks’ ‘FROM LEARNING!’ they yell back. ‘And what are you going to do over the summer?’ she persists. ‘READ 10 BOOKS,’ they yell. A simple learning technique but it works. Think up some aphorisms of your own and use the Beginnings festival to begin to use them with the children.

I encourage schools to associate a colour and a kind of music with each festival and in early September, at the start of the school year, filling your school with the colour of sunshine and sunflowers, with cheerful music or bird song would seem appropriate.

The start of any new venture is full of hope and possibility – and of anxiety. The start of the academic year is no exception. We feel full of excitement – and full of trepidation and so do the children. Change is uncomfortable and the unknown can feel very scary.

Structure can help to alleviate anxiety so that change can be enjoyable. A mixture of the familiar and the new takes away some of the worry and allows children and adults to relax. Having Beginnings ‘rituals’ that are the same each year provides a little structure at what can be an anxious time. A ‘First Day’ assembly where the same song is sung each year, the same prayer said and the same story told would provide just this kind of familiar anchor.

Change is challenging and children’s lives are changing all the time, because as children they are changing all the time. What makes change bearable is a feeling of being in control over some aspects of our life. This is difficult for children to feel because they are really not in control over very much of what they do, or of their environment. They are at school because they have to be, they spend much of the day doing what adults tell them to do in an environment designed by adults. They study a curriculum laid down by other adults who feel they know best what children should do with their time. Not a lot of choices there!

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