As we are a school committed to children’s wellbeing, we are often asked about building children’s self esteem and confidence. If you are building these in effectively you are building resilience, the ability to work through friction and discomfort in a positive way. That’s a big ask for many of us as adults, so with children we start basic and small.

The first step is to start from a base of security, that’s why in kindergarten we work really hard to communicate that ‘the world is good’.  It is particularly challenging to maintain this through a partnership breakup or through the messiness of everyday life when you are not seeing eye to eye with all other adults surrounding your child. Things will always go ‘wrong’ to some degree, as we all have wonderfully different ideas. It may help to focus on the intentions of others, more than details, and sit with the big picture. Children need to know that they are in the right place, and surrounded by a trustworthy circle of adults.

Praise can build self esteem and confidence but it can also induce anxiety, so we strive here to ensure that it is delivered in a meaningful way. We try to focus praise on effort rather than outcome, because at the foundational learning stage it is engagement over outcome that counts every time. Children’s work does not have to be perfect but it does need to show some level of commitment, and that could look like special thoughtful details in a drawing, or careful even pressure from a crayon. This is the evidence of a strong and positive bond with learning coming through.

Meanwhile in the classroom we build resilience by encouraging students to make work from scratch, encourage them to talk about errors and mistakes and teachers model overcoming difficulty on our chalkboards.

Thank you for working with us to build the foundations of life-long resilience.

Have a lovely week!