Year 8 Wellbeing Program

The Year 8 Wilderness Wellbeing Program, named by students as ‘A Wild Life’, is an evidence-based 8-week program that covers contemporary issues impacting our young people. The program highlights wellbeing as a conceptual interconnected framework, making it accessible for our Year 8 students. Covering a broad range of wellbeing concepts – such as perfectionism, helpful and balanced thinking, resilience and gratitude – this program provides our Year 8 Girls with important social and emotional skills and equips them to take on the myriad of social, emotional and academic life challenges.

At the start of this program, Year 8 students ideated around an ‘Emotional Charter’. The idea behind a school (or family) charter is inspired by Professor Marc Brakett, Founding Director of the Yale Centre for Emotional Intelligence. It includes a list of commitments that everyone in the Year 8 cohort will make to one another to create a warm, connected and safe school environment, by asking two simple questions: “how do we want to feel as a family?” and “what we can we do to experience these feelings as often as possible?”

Here are some reflections from Year 8 students about the program:

In the Year 8 Wellbeing Program, we have looked at stress and how there is good stress and how when you are stressed for too long it can have negative consequences on your wellbeing. I connect to this topic because it is something that I go through. If I have many tests in a row it can stress me out and I can get things like stress headaches and lose sleep. I have learned that stress can be good if we give ourselves time to rest so that we are able to grow. - Zara Hill

The Year 8 Wellbeing program has helped me realise how it is so important not to judge your emotions and feelings as they are all important. It has also made me recognise that I am only in Year 8, so I all need to concentrate on my general wellbeing in addition to my grades. - Isabel Flowers

In the Wellbeing Program, our main learnings have been about emotions, stress and wellbeing. We learned to understand emotions, how they affect us and the personal indicators of emotions. We learned to not sacrifice our wellbeing due to workload (i.e. sleep) and understood that our stress – both good and bad – is needed to grow, but should also be complemented with rest and recuperation to help us grow. - Lainie Reu

The program logo and graphic below, showing the four domains of student wellbeing underpinning the learnings and concepts of the program, were designed by student Isabel Flowers.

Andrew Mittiga
Teacher

Year 8 Camp

Sessions have been held with the Year 8 girls to begin their preparations for the upcoming camp at Yankalilla. Year 8 Core Groups 1 and 2 will attend in Week 8, Sunday 11 September to Friday 16 September and Core Groups 3 and 4 will attend in Week 10, Sunday 25 September to Friday 30 September.

REALISE

Sessions have also been held with the Year 9 girls to prepare them for their three-week experience at Crawford. Core Group 3 will leave for Crawford on Sunday 11 September and parents will collect their daughters on Saturday 1 October. The girls in Core Group 4 are the final REALISE group for the year. Their experience begins on Sunday 16 October and concludes on Saturday 5 November.

Cedar in the Snow

Cedar Day was celebrated on Wednesday and was the final House Day for the year. The Vietnamese rolls, snow cones and hot chocolates proved very popular with our Middle School girls. Well done to the Year 12 House Captains, Tori Lane and Sophie Lockie, for running a successful day with the help of Ms Elisa Stracci and all the Cedar Stars. The proceeds of all House Days support the Bhadure School community in Nepal.

Year 7 Parent Social Event

The Year 7 Class Reps would like to invite all Year 7 parents to a casual social event at The Lion on Friday 16 September from 7.00pm onwards. Please RSVP here.

If you have any questions or would like to join the committee, please contact Polly Tembel, Kirsten Croser, Sabina Mikhi or Andrew Perry.