Building better friendships
You may have heard your son or daughter coming home with phrases such as “we had a friendship fire,” or “it was mean on purpose.”
These phrases are important terms/phrases from the URStrong friendship program which we have begun implementing in Years 1–6, with a focus on the language in Prep and Kinder.
The URStrong program is a cornerstone of the Kinder – Year 6 EMPOWER program and focuses on children teaching others how to treat them.
Included in the K-6 Assembly last week was a focus on the URStrong program’s Four Friendship Facts. We focused on the first two – No Friendship is perfect (Friendship fires happen and that’s okay) and Every friendship is different (wouldn’t it be boring if we were all the same?!) In this we spoke about Friendship fires and why they are normal and how to ‘sort them out.’
We then read a book, Pearl Barley and Charlie Parsley by Aaron Blabey, about a friendship where both the children were very different from each other, but that’s okay.
Over the coming weeks you will begin to see a number of changes as we encourage our community to use the URStrong programs language. We will be changing our Bucketfiller certificate to – the Heart of Friendship Award.
You will see a number of posters going up around the school that incorporate and remind us of the key learnings from the program. We encourage you to speak with your child about these, and assist them to develop their friendship skills.
More information about the program and parent resources can be found here: Over the coming weeks we will be adding some articles to the newsletter as resources for parents in our community.
Mrs Olivia Stephen - Co-coordinator of Pastoral Care K-6
A Catholic School in the Salesian Tradition
