Teach-Primary-Issue-19.3

FEATURES PASTORAL 4 | CREATE CLASS RULES Ask your pupils to discuss the following statements with a partner and add any others they think are relevant: Think differently: you could be wrong about that other person having a better life. Look around you: watch and listen. Other people may be struggling with complicated feelings, too. Share how you are feeling with someone you trust: in My Life on Fire , Ren makes a friend she can confide in and everything changes. We are all different and important in our own ways. What is special about you? What are you good at? Display the rules in the classroom. 5 | USE DRAMA Drama is a great way to explore character choices and the impact of decisions they make. Why not try hot-seating a character who is feeling jealous, or create a Conscience Alley where children interact with a character during a moment of crisis? One child represents the fictional character and they walk down a ‘corridor’ of others, who each offer advice or ask questions. Encourage pupils to write monologues exploring the viewpoints and worries of story characters and perform them. 6 | BUILD SELF ESTEEM To limit comparisons with others, always avoid valuables in school, and be wary of overpraising some children. Always offer Golden Time or house points for a very wide range of ‘achievements’, including kindness and thoughtful actions. Embrace the work of EmpathyLab and take a look at their excellent resources available to schools, including their annual Read for Empathy booklists ( tinyurl.com/tp-Empathy ) . Another self-esteem-boosting activity I like is to ask the children to create a squiggle character and fill the spaces with the things that make them who they are (people and things they love, sports and favourite foods). Get them to decorate their drawings with their favourite colours. Face up to the green-eyed monster and help children work through those envious moments 6 ways to help pupils with feelings of jealousy CATH HOWE CathHowe is a children’s author and teaches creative writing in London primary schools. Her book series, Call the Puffins! (£7.99, Hachette Children’s), all about bravery and resilience, is out now. cathhowe.com | @cathhowe.bsky.social | @cath_howe 1 | ENCOURAGE EMOTIONAL LITERACY Using book characters creates safe ground in class discussions, because children’s own circumstances are not the focus. Highlight moments when characters in stories have strong feelings such as jealousy, confusion or anger. Do we all agree about what the character is feeling? Create your own feelings bank as a class, and try colour coding it. We talk about seeing red or being green with envy , so find out how many of these expressions the children are familiar with and discuss them. You can also write simple poems where feelings are represented in colours, e.g. ‘When I feel blue…’ Emphasise that strong feelings are normal, and that we all experience them. 2 | EXPLORE JEALOUS FEELINGS Jealousy and envy are slightly different. Envy is wanting what someone else has, whereas jealousy is worrying that what you already have will be taken away. Divide the class into small groups of four or five. Ask each child to draw a cat. Give one member of each groupmuch better materials than the others, for example pens and coloured pencils, while the rest have scrap paper and a simple pencil. No sharing allowed. Then come back together and ask what the children felt during the task. Encourage them to describe the feelings, and then discuss them as a class. 3 | DISSECT CHARACTER CHOICES In my middle-grade books, the main characters often doubt and compare themselves to others. In My Life on Fire , Ren has lost everything in a house fire. When she sees all the small precious things belonging to classmates, she feels a yawning sense of hurt inside and begins to take things and hide them. But jealousy can be very damaging. Ren knows what she is doing is wrong, and her shame grows. Ask the class to write Ren a letter or message at a key moment in the story, giving her advice on how to deal with her loss and the resultant jealous feelings. www.teachwire.net | 11