On Wednesday evening, The Parent Team delivered a talk to parents on ‘Developing Healthy Friendships’. In this 90 minute workshop, we learned all about how boys and girls develop, how they experience friendship and ways in which we can help them navigate and maintain relationships. As teachers, dealing with friendship issues is part of the job and, through our PSHE programme, we explicitly teach the children about healthy relationships and what it means to be a good friend, as well as supporting children on a daily basis with issues which arise in the playground.
Friendships are an integral part of all our lives and learning how to model and teach healthy friendships to our children is important, but falling out is also part of growing up, so having some strategies to support children when things go wrong with friends is really useful. In the workshop, we learned not to try and always jump in and fix the problem, but to teach them to problem solve themselves. This is an approach we take with the children when they are in school. Every mistake, every falling out, is a learning opportunity, a chance to reflect and improve.
Thank you to those parents who were able to attend. The feedback I have had has been extremely positive so I hope to organise similar talks over the course of the academic year.
Mrs Harry Fryer (Deputy Head Pastoral)
