Positive Education

The wellbeing of our children and their families is a priority. Positive Education brings together the science of Positive Psychology, developed by Professor Martin Seligman with best practice teaching to encourage and support individuals, learning centres and communities to flourish. Flourishing is a combination of ‘feeling good and doing good.’ Positive Education focuses on specific skills that assist children to strengthen their relationships, build positive emotions, enhance personal resilience, promote mindfulness, and encourage a healthy lifestyle.

We have been focusing on developing the following strategies which, help to build positive emotion:

  • Bucket Filling – encourages positive behaviour as children see how rewarding it is to express daily kindness and gratitude. Bucket filling and dipping are effective metaphors for understanding the effects of our actions and words on the wellbeing of others and ourselves.
  • Specks of Gold – intentionally looking for, noticing and being grateful for the good things that happen in our day – the ‘specks of gold’.

BUCKET FILLING

The educators and children have been working together to embed the language of bucket filling in our early care and learning centre. We use this language to describe how we are feeling, to describe our actions and to describe the impact our words and actions are having on ourselves and others.

We have a bucket in our centre and each time we do or say something that fills our own or another person’s bucket, we add a stone to our bucket. It’s a visual way for children to identify with the concept of bucket filling. The children feel very proud when they add a stone to the bucket and love seeing it fill up each day with stones which symbolise the kindness they are showing to others.

We have also been reading many stories about bucket filling.

SPECKS OF GOLD

Each day during our afternoon group time, we share our ‘specks of gold’ from the day. The children love sharing the best part of their day both from home and their time at our ELC. Here are our specks of gold for the week so far.

The power of these positive education strategies lies in their language – they give children (and adults) the words to describe their learning, feelings and the complex social interactions they engage in.

You may like to use the language of bucket filling and specks of gold at home too.

If you would like any further information or resources about positive education, please feel free to come and have a chat.

Nicole 🙂