Our U15 girls started their season with a competitive match v Meldrum Academy at home. The team worked hard and our goal scorers were Olivia (S2), Abby (S1), Leia (S1) and Daisy (S1). The team demonstrated a lot of potential, but unfortunately we were defeated this time. We are excited for our forthcoming matches next week : Monday home v Turriff in the league and Friday home v Lochside in the Scottish shield.
Our young people have been discussing what skills and qualities are required for a leader particularly in the role of MVP.
They will be developing and using these skills in order to educate peers in topics such as social media use, friendship interactions etc and may have to use their leadership traits to deliver sessions on topics that people find challenging or have fixed views about.
The role and responsibility of the bystander is to speak up and interrupt inappropriate statements / behaviour : the standard we walk past is the standard we accept.
Today some of our senior pupils are undertaking training to become Mentors in Violence Prevention………we started with some ice breakers!
On Thursday 16th March we hosted a health and wellbeing family learning event with a focus on supporting our S3-6 young people as they prepare for their SQA exams. Our S3 and S4 MH peer educators shared some information about their role in school and how support can be accessed and then led the groups around four workshops with a focus on :
Resilient thinking skills and strength spotting
Healthy food choices and brain boosting snacks
The importance of sleep and anxiety management
Nutrition and exercise to help your wellbeing
We welcomed the following providers and they delivered their information in a varied and informative manner.
A Shearer – Full Colour Coaching
D Tuckwood and F Burnett – Public Health Team / NHS
T Stoddard – Trainee School Nurse / NHS
Lyndsay Van Der Starre – ElevateUfitness
We will share information from the workshops with you digitally, please look out for an email with the link to the resources.
Tickets will be on sale on Monday lunchtime from 1.35pm in D069
We have a number of jackets in our lost property. If you have lost a jacket recently then please access the attached link below to review the images and contact Jo Munro (jo.munro@aberdeenshire.gov.uk) to have it returned to you.
All items left in school by Wednesday 7th December will be donated to our preloved winter jacket resource. Lost Property – Winter Jackets Nov 2022
We have pre-loved winter jackets available for any person who requires them, please take what you need from the selection in our main entrance.
Today we welcomed Marie from Marie Souter Beauty Therapy to Alford Academy to provide some wellbeing treatments for staff. Staff had the choice of the following treatments: Smooth and Hydrate Facial, Scalp Massage and Hand and Arm Massage. Thank you, Marie, for donating your time and expertise, we will welcome you back any time!
https://en-gb.facebook.com/mariesouterbeautytherapy/
Today we undertook our final session of the peer coaching programme. We focused on exploring the GROW coaching framework to support us to deliver a structured coaching conversation. We worked in pairs or trios to practice our coaching skills and are beginning to feel more confident in delivering our coaching questions.
We learned about emotional intelligence, our anxious brain and thinking traps identifying some strategies that may be helpful to overcome these e.g. calm breathing techniques, re-framing thoughts, catch it – check it – change it and the miracle question. We practiced how to use problem talk to identify what challenges the individual might be facing and how they feel and used solution talk to help identify how they may be able to move forward and overcome the challenge.
We used our character strengths cards to identify what our signature strengths are and practiced how we could use these cards when working with a peer, with a focus on how they could use their strengths to find a way to deal with the identified challenge. A huge thank you to Angie Shearer from Full Colour Coaching, we are looking forward to trying out our new skills with our peers in our role as Mental Health Peer Educators in the coming weeks.
Today we undertook session two of the peer coaching programme. We focused on identifying questions that we could use in our coaching conversations and played ‘coaching pong’, working together to suggest improvements to the questions we had devised.
We completed our wellbeing wheel and then used our coaching skills of listening, summarisation and reflection to support each other to identify ways to coach a peer. It provided us with the opportunity to practice our coaching questions in a ‘real life’ scenario.
We are looking forward to participating in our final session on Monday 21st November.