The topic of bereavement can be hard for staff to tackle and the activity book is written with that in mind. It helps anyone working with individuals or small groups of bereaved children by giving them activities and guidance based on theory that gets children talking. It has 20 session plans with a range of activities that mean leaders can focus on listening to the young people that they are working with. It’s split into sections that focus on different areas that leaders might want to tackle. It comes with photocopiable resources and is suitable for 8-18 year olds. It's available on the Child Bereavement UK website.
Some Topics for School Assemblies
If time is taken out for school spaces being used for exams and other special events then most schools or year groups will have at least 25 assemblies to plan for in a year. I know that some have many more than this, it it’s twice a week that could be 50. It’s hard to think of this amount of themes and topics to deliver in a range of different ways that will enage the young people at school.
Here are some ideas for including different themes in school assemblies.
1 - One assembly topic can look at a variety of themes. For example in the Nelson Mandela secondary assembly the themes include racism, rights, resilience and forgiveness all with some history mixed into to a very powerful story. There are a whole range of themes in the series of assemblies about Inspirational People for Primary and Secondary schools
2 - Use topics that are relevant to young peoples lives. A lot of young people lives are lived on line today there are a lot of values and themes that can be looked at from the perspective of our online world. Our online resilience assemblies for secondary schools examine how to look after yourself online but can include topics like decision making, image and happiness at the same time.
3 -The flip side of the first two ideas is to focus on one thing that will deal with a lot of issues students might face. Resilience (primary) and Mindset (secondary) are obvious ones but themes like attendance and stress will help students with a variety of different challenges.
4 - Have a fun assembly about something uncoventional that has a more light hearted message. The Story of Kyle McDonald shows how one man swapped a red paperclip for a house in fourteen swaps. It’s light hearted and compelling but it also shows what can happen when you have a big ideas and act on it. It here for Primary and Secondary schools. The whackiest of ideas can capture a child’s mind and they might remember it for a long time.
5 - Use a film clip or a YouTube Video to capture their imagination and bring in a powerful topic at the same time. There is a good clip from Kung Fu Panda that can be used to introduce the idea of mindfulness and another on bullying from the same film.
How to make school assemblies more interesting.
Having to capture the attention of about 200 children or young people at any time is a challenge. The fact that most assemblies happen first thing in the morning doesn’t make this job any easier, especially for staff working with teenagers for who mornings can be difficult to embrace .Here are some ideas to help grasp the attention of students of any age. These are the sort of things built in to the majority of the school assembly PowerPoints on the Impact Assemblies website to make them entertaining as well as informative.
1 - Engage the audience as soon as they enter the room. Have something on the screen to make the young people think about something to do with the topic of the assembly. It’s best if it isn’t something that gives away the topic of the assembly to avoid anyone deciding they don’t like it before it’s even started. For example, if the assembly were about resilience then you could have a quote on the screen from a well-known person who has been resilient or has said something about being resilient. If the assembly was about mental health, then you could have a question about a statistic to do with that.
2 - The WIIFM. Before any of us buy in to something we need to know the WIIFM - What’s In It For Me. Without the WIIFM it is hard to see why something is relevant. Why would a young person listen to someone talking about a topic if they cannot see why it’s relevant to their life. After introducing the topic tell them why it is going to help them or how they can help someone else with what they are about to learn.
3 - Involve the audience. Ask them to answer a question with a show of hands or ask a multi choice question with hands up for A/B/C/D. Put a post it note under some students seats to represent a statistic or win a prize. Ask some students to come out and do something linked to the assembly. I saw a great assembly launching the Duke of Edinburgh scheme at a school that involved one of the children walking up and down the stairs at the back of the hall with a fully loaded rucksack as the member of staff talked.
4 - Use less words. People can read faster than someone else can talk. So, if the PowerPoint has sentences or long bullet points in students will get to the end of anything you read faster than you can. The presenter runs the risk of always telling the audience something that they already know. Try to use images to replace words. There are good tips about learning and brains that show how you can do that.
5 - Use images as cues so that you can talk about the topic the slide introduces rather than reading off the slide or a script.
6 - Use video clips. YouTube has millions of short films about lots of relevant topics. Impact Assemblies has a useful one about hard work that uses Will Smith as an example. There are others in the follow up email that comes with the free assembly downloadable from the home page.
7 - Finish the assembly with one memorable thing that creates a feeling that you want the students to remember. As Maya Angelou said, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel”. A short hard-hitting real-life story works well.
A post lockdown question for your pupils...
There is a question that has been on my mind since the start of the Covid 19 ‘lockdown’ in the UK.
Would Children and Young People in the UK rather be isolated, but with their phones and access to social media or back to normal life at school, but without their phones.
The first mention of social distancing made me think that today we don’t really have to be socially distant if we don’t want to be. What we have experienced is really physical distrancing. Even if we can’t be physcially close to others we can be in constant communication with each other these days digitally. Whether this virtual contact feels the same for us as being physically close to someone is another question, but for young people who communicate a lot via their phones, how ‘distant’ will they be feeling during the lockdown? According to a study at Glasgow University the ‘average’ teenager spends between 1 and 3 hours on social media. Does that make them feel connected or is it a reminder of physical distance?
I thought that this question might be a good way to get discussions going about what we use phones for and what the lockdown was like for the young people that you work with. This kind of discussion could go well with this assembly.
