Star Teina is a life skills and values programme delivered to the whole school by trained Star Teina leaders. Our leaders facilitate a weekly classroom programme that encourages positive attitudes in both social and academic situations.
Student key learning outcomes include...
Engagement and participation
Improvement in listening and communication skills
Help students to play cooperatively and resolve behavioural issues more easily
Build a sense of self-worth and self-confidence
Encourage students to take responsibility and be accountable for their actions
Learn valuable life skills
Develop/strengthen a ‘can do’ attitude and have positive approach to the challenges of life
Across the school students contributed to making a 'recycled materials community'.
Students identified various aspects of their community that could enhance the well-being of its members. Building on these ideas students created a physical representation of their ideas using recycled materials.
To be successful at this students needed to demonstrate 'respectful communication'. They achieved this by ...
Listening to the ideas of others
Building on the ideas and suggestions of others
Respecting the opinion of others
Understand what is meant by the words 'collective' and 'wellbeing'
Being creative and taking risks
Working together to complete an agreed upon aspect for the community.
TASK: In small groups build to a structure/object that can do the following...
Hold a cell-phone for at least 20 seconds
Be strong enough that a team member can go underneath it without the structure falling over.
Problems that we needed to overcome ...
Ensuring that the structure was strong enough to stay standing
Incorporating the ideas of everyone
Deciding who had the best skills to crawl under the structure without it falling
Keeping to a time deadline
Ensuring that everyone participated
What did we learn?
We learnt that to get the best result we need to all work together and value the ideas of others. It is hard to get things completed when team members just sit back and do their own thing. If everyone contributes it makes the job easier and we can finish quicker.
An environment that promotes teamwork fosters friendship and loyalty. These close-knit relationships motivate students in parallel and aligns them to work harder, cooperate and be supportive of one another.
Participating in team activities can help students develop essential communication and collaboration skills while preparing them or success inside and outside of the classroom.
Learning intentions for this exercise include...
1. Teaching essential social skills
2. Improvement in self-confidence
3. Acceptance of others ideas and skills
4. Recognise that we all have different strengths and weaknesses.