T’is the season to practice gratitude. Gratitude for your teachers, your parents, those who have helped you throughout the year. You can also be thankful for where you live (places don’t come more beautiful than Barwon Heads), for our school, your friends just to name a few.

Practicing gratitude is one of the simplest tools that you can use to improve how you are feeling.

Research has shown that the positive side effects of using gratitude include physical benefits such as better sleep and psychological benefits including less anxiety and increased happiness and resilience.  Social benefits include; fewer feelings of loneliness and isolation, increased forgiveness and greater helpfulness and generosity.

When thinking about the things that we are grateful for, the benefits will be greater if you don’t think about the “things” you have, such as toys but rather, look for kindness from others, or a kind deed that you have seen or been involved in.

Sone of the ways in which you can practice gratitude is to write a thank you letter to your teacher family members or someone else who has supported you during the year. Saying thank you can benefit the wellbeing of you and the recipient of the gratitude.

Another way of practicing gratitude is to be a gratitude detective by watching for kind and caring behaviour from other people.

How about boosting your wellbeing by setting yourself a challenge to show gratitude in some way every day?

Practicing Gratitude

Short Film about Gratitude

Gratitude is my Superpower

My Attitude of Gratitude

The Science of Gratitude

Did I Ever Tell You How Happy You Are? Dr Seuss

The Gratitude Tree Guided Meditation

The Gratitude Experiment

What are you grateful for right now?

Is HOPE one of your character strengths?

The character strength of hope has to do with positive expectations about the future. It involves optimistic thinking and focusing on good things to come. Hope is more than a feel-good emotion. It is an action-oriented strength involving agency, the motivation and confidence that goals can be reached, and also that many effective pathways can be devised in order to get to that desired future.

Students who are high in hope have greater academic success, stronger friendships, and demonstrate more creativity and better problem solving skills. The good news is that hope is very similar to the growth mindset in that it can be cultivated.

Hope doesn’t mean wishful thinking—as in “I hope I win the lottery.” Instead, a person who is high in hope is able to:  

• Set clear and attainable goals.
• Develop multiple strategies to reach those goals.
• Stay motivated to use the strategies to attain the goals, even when the going gets tough.

Visualising the paths to your goals will help you to achieve them and using a growth mindset will help overcome obstacles.

Another hint is to remember other successes that you and role models have achieved. There are many people who have overcome adversity to reach their goals.

It’s important that you enjoy the process of attaining your goals. If you use positive self-talk, you will be more likely to achieve your goals.

The North Star; a story of life which involves following the windy track on the journey to achieving your goals.

Hope can be about your wishes for yourself in the short term and long term future. It can also be about small steps of action for the good of the whole, for example, recycling things that you have used to contribute to a cleaner planet!

Think about your role models (such as scientisits, authors, environmental activists, sporting heroes) as they have managed, through small steps and persistence, to achieve their hopes!

What are your dreams and hopes?