Wellbeing

At Green Square Public School, student wellbeing is at the centre of all that we do so that every student feels safe, included and ready to learn. Our educators support our students to thrive at school and in daily life.

During Thought Garden lessons, all of our children learn about key elements of wellbeing and mental health. A key focus is brain awareness. Using animal analogies to teach key parts of the brain, children are introduced to the basics of neuroscience, how our brain works, strategies for emotional regulation and what it means to feel mentally healthy.  Knowing about the parts of the brain helps to empower our thinking. Watch this short video to meet the 'brain animals'.

Grow Your Mind Brain Awareness

Listen to Alice tell us more about the brain animals

As well as learning about the parts of the brain and how they are regulated, our students are learning strategies to optimise each part of their brain and ensure they work together. In other words, how we ensure emotional regulation, good decision making, focus, great memory, empathy and overall positive mental health. Here is a window into each of the brain animals. You might like to ask your child about them!

Guard Dog  –  amygdala  – this part of the brain determines whether we will fight, freeze or flee from a situation. Our Guard Dog is important as it protects and enables us to sense fear. Sometimes, however, our Guard Dog gets really BIG and really BOSSY when we are angry or stressed. When this happens the animal helpers or parts of our brain cannot talk to each other.

One of the easiest ways to SHRINK our Guard Dog is to be aware of our breathing. A simple technique that we have been practising with the students is finger breathing. This involves running your finger up and down each digit on one hand, breathing in as your trace up the thumb/finger and breathing out as your trace down the thumb/finger. This mindfulness activity enables us to focus on and slow our breathing down which in turn slows our heart rate and calms the body and ultimately shrinks our Guard Dog.

We discover the Guard Dog catastrophe scale in class. This resource helps students to understand that sometimes our Guard Dog can look and feel like a huge problem when in fact the problem is teeny tiny. This is helping students to match their reaction to the size of the problem. We don’t want our Guard Dog to look like it does when there is a HUGE problem, when we are actually only facing a teeny tiny problem. It is important students know that it is ok to feel like it is a huge problem but we don’t need our reaction to look like it.

Wise Owl  -  prefrontal cortex  – this part of the brain helps to make decisions.

Our Wise Owl is important as it helps us make decisions and allows us to be a flexible friend. It can problem solve and carry out higher order thinking. So, when everything is going smoothly and our guard dog is small, Wise Owl is capable of making good decisions and helping us to act in a way that does not harm ourselves or others. Wise Owl is very useful to us!

Elephant –   Hippocampus –  helps us remember.

Elephant helps us to lock in memories and stores the information we learn. It helps us to remember names, places and other new things. Elephant stores information and tries to remember it when we need it.

Sifting Sooty  –  Reticular Activating System (RAS) -  helps us to focus.

Sensitive Octopus  –  Insular Cortex -  imagining how someone else is feeling and channeling empathy.