Somersham Primary School

About Our School : What's New Archive

Say What You Feel

7 September 2006

Introducing a new whole school programme: SEAL

With the rather soggy August but a distant memory, it is lovely to welcome back the children to their new bird-themed classes and to look forward to fresh and exciting opportunities during the year ahead. One important area that we will be targeting is children’s social and emotional well-being, using a nationally acclaimed programme.

Our school thinks that your child is of great importance and we believe that to be able to learn they need to be happy, confident, understand themselves, understand their feelings, and know how to get on with each other and make friends.

To help all our children with this we will be working in school on special activities that develop these skills.

Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning (SEAL) has been recently introduced as part of the government’s Primary National Strategy Excellence and Enjoyment. SEAL is made up of five aspects of learning: self-awareness, managing feelings, motivation, empathy and social skills, and is designed to be used across the whole school community. We believe that this cross-curricular resource, which will involve training for all staff that have direct contact with the children, will develop our school as a community that successfully promotes social, emotional and behavioural well-being of all our members.

The SEAL programme envisages that each half-term, every class team will be looking at a particular theme. The theme will start with an assembly and be followed up in class. We hope you will be able to join us in school for some of these assemblies and some of the work in classrooms.

The theme for Spring term, aspects of which some classes and year teams have already planned to trial this Autumn, will be New Beginnings. During the term the children will be exploring how to create a learning environment that helps them learn together in a happy, busy and safe way. They will also learn about the feelings they have when they are happy, sad, scared and excited, and how to manage these feelings in the classroom.

In November, we will focus as a school on anti-bullying in a week-long SEAL theme entitled ‘Say No to Bullying’. This is not because we have any more bullying than any other school. It is a planned part of the programme that will take place every year at this time. Details of future SEAL themes will be published later this term.

Over the year we will introduce activities to do at home. Some of these will be best done together with an adult. We hope you will enjoy doing these with your child. There will also be regular updates on the children’s progress and achievements in future issues of the school’s newsletter and on this website.

SEAL is one part of our personal, social and health education curriculum in Foundation Stage and Key Stages 1 and 2. We are confident that it will increase opportunities for children to share their thoughts and feelings, and to develop their listening skills and an understanding of other people’s points of view. Our active, whole school approach in this vital area of learning will encourage positive behaviour, an enjoyment of learning and a renewed pride in personal achievement both within and beyond the classroom.

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