Developing Resilience in Y1

By David Whitaker, Y1 Class Teacher, Pipworth Community Primary School

In Autumn, we were part of a music project run by Polly Ives and the Concerteenies. The children learnt some short songs to sing throughout a story. The project culminated in a concert at the Crucible Theatre with Polly and a live orchestra. The story which we used for this project was called ‘Izzy Gizmo’, which is about a girl who invents things to help her and her grandad but she frequently becomes frustrated with them as they don’t work or end up going wrong. Her grandad is constantly reminding her not to give up and to keep on trying again and again and eventually she succeeds.

I decided that because sometimes my children find tasks quite difficult and their resilience is not always very strong, that I would begin the project by reading them the story again and reinforcing the message that if you don’t succeed the first time, then try again, try something different but don’t give up!

Toys Project

Our topic in History this half term is all about Toys and how they have changed. The Maker Project was a perfect complement to this as we were had been exploring how toys from the past were mostly handmade and sometimes even made by children to keep themselves entertained. We had already looked briefly at plastic marble and wooden marble runs over the course of the topic so the children were familiar with how they worked and how they looked.

Our first session involved the children exploring the materials we had given them; cardboard, paper, paper cups, cardboard tubes, tape, glue and various types of fastenings (paper clips etc.). We had talked briefly about what could be done with each of the materials, e.g. paper could be rolled into tubes, and cardboard could be folded to make a channel/chute.

By the end of the first session most children had joined a rolled up paper tube to a cardboard tube or a paper cup. We then talked about if these looked exciting and would be interesting to play with. Most children said that the marble would just go straight down the tube and land on the floor – not like a ‘proper marble run’ that had zig-zags for the marble to move along.

In the next session, most of the children began to experiment more with how they could make a zig-zag marble run structure. Most of the children stopped using the cardboard as it was too difficult to work with and moved to mainly using rolled up paper tubes. Some children required support with this.

The next obstacle to overcome was how to get the marble run structure to stand up. In the first session, some children had taped part of their structure to a table but I challenged most of the children to think about how they could make it freestanding.

I found this was where we saw most children working together and helping each other out. A lot of what we saw up to this point was children working in isolation and just working on their own ideas.

Overall, the children (and myself and TA) really enjoyed the experience. It was really interesting – and quite daunting – to take a step back and watch the children, at least initially, experiment and explore the materials they had without them having as much input as they were probably used to receiving.

Looking across the different abilities in the class, we found that some of the lower ability pupils found the task difficult as there was possibly a lack of structure to the sessions but there were some lower ability pupils who worked really well and managed to create a working marble run. Similarly, there didn’t appear to be any particular patterns with how our higher ability pupils engaged; some of them relished the challenge and did show us how resilient they could be whereas others needed constant reassurance and coaching.