At Musselburgh Grammar School, we have 4 S1 Nurture groups. Each Nurture session is delivered over two periods a week by Miss Doherty, one of our Pupil Support Workers and Mrs McLean, our Curriculum Leader of Inclusion and Nurture. The main aim of our Nurture Groups is to address the social, emotional and learning needs of our young people by providing the necessary support to remove barriers to learning. There is a great emphasis on emotional literacy, language development and communication during these lessons.

In Nurture this session we have been thinking about our strengths and who we are as people and what makes us important. This has involved discussion in our small groups and has allowed all young people to get involved in conversations around themselves and what qualities they like/dislike in others. We have also discussed self-care and how we might charge our self-care batteries when we aren’t feeling 100% and this has allowed young person to think for themselves about strategies that make them feel good about themselves. 

Every week we start our session with a hot drink, snack and general chat about the positives of the week/weekend and what we are looking forward to in the week ahead. As well as this, we have also taken part in group activities, including baking Halloween brownies and cookies before the February break, watching a movie that we have chosen together at Halloween and Christmas, made fidget toys, played games together and worked together as a group on the Christmas door decorations. 

We were also involved in handing out letters to local businesses asking for donations for our Christmas raffle for the Christmas Market where we managed to raise just under £200 for the Inclusion and Nurture department at school. This has allowed us to buy new games, slime making kits and jigsaws, all of which were asked for by our young people who access Nurture. 

We have also taken part in well-being walks where we have gone to local parks and local areas and discussed the benefits of walking for our mental health and well-being. In January, we started looking at our goals for the year ahead and this is something we will be looking at further as we finish our nurture sessions at the end of May for the new timetable starting in June. We have been talking about our feelings, our emotions and have just started work on empathy tasks where we consider how others feel and how our actions have consequences that we might not have thought about previously.

Pictures below include wellbeing walks, cooking, trips, Christmas door competitions, Breakfast club and much more.

We started our Nurture sessions on the week beginning 2nd October 2024 and each week our young people been busy with lots of exciting activities. When Mrs Doherty and Mrs McLean first met each group, we asked what activities they would like to do so have incorporated their likes into what we do each week. So there is lots of personalisation and choice involved.

Please see below an example of what Nurture groups got up to from October to Christmas.

Week 1: All about me and star of strength

Week 2: Baking – Halloween brownies (Practical cooking)

After the October break:

Week 3: Wellbeing Walk including distributing leaflets / letters for the Christmas fair and picking snacks for Halloween movie.

Week 4: Halloween movie – the groups worked together to pick the movie they watched.

Week 5: Our battery life and the rest of the Halloween movie.

Week 6: Fidget making, games and Christmas door planning.

Week 7:  Colouring in, Lego and Christmas door preparation.

Week 8: Wellbeing walk and Christmas Gonk making / painting.

Week 9: Decorating our Christmas doors.

Week 10: Decorating our Christmas doors.

Week 11: Christmas movie.