Building a positive sense of self: A guest post by Ruth Radcliffe

At Joseph Norton in KS2, we spend our afternoons participating in Thrive activities that help us build a positive sense of self and build optimal learning capacity.

Some of our favourite Thrive activities are mindfulness sessions, arts and crafts and outdoor activities. This week, we used great team work to build a group robot. We decided to use recycled materials, which we brought in from home. We were all amazed at how many materials can be recycled and were really proud of our efforts to collect so many different materials. We delegated roles and each of us created a different body part. We used our incredible imaginations to design buttons for our robot - all with different functions!

The time we spend in Thrive helps us recognise different emotions. We thought about empathy this week and how we can sympathise with others. We then applied this to our English lesson.

We have been reading The Iron Man and thought about how the characters may be feeling. We wrote superb letters from Hogarth to The Iron Man, to apologise for trapping him.

Our Thrive activities help us improve all aspects of our development and learning and we can't wait to continue on our Thrive journey.

Thank you so much to Ruth for sharing her Thrive experiences with us. You can read plenty more lovely blogs from the school here.

Over to you

Reduced anxiety and behavioural incidents. Calmer classrooms filled with engaged leaners. Improved relationships with parents and carers. These are just some of the outcomes reported by settings embedding Thrive’s whole-school approach to mental health and wellbeing. Are you ready to join them? Click here to get started.