Today we held our annual International Day at CDL. We celebrate having over 110+ nationalities and try to find ways for us to share in each other’s cultures. International Day is an opportunity for students to cook delicacies from their home country and showcase them to the school community. It is also an opportunity to raise money and support the CDL charities.
This week, we focused on Attachment figures during our well-being tutorial; the second critical takeaway of this Pillar 5. Attachment theory focuses on long-term interactions and bonds between people, such as those between parents and children and romantic partners. The quality of our early attachments has a significant impact on two things:
• Our Personality
• Our later-life relationships
Our pupils empathise with others, communicate sentiments with others, display trust, engage in long-term relationships, have high self-esteem, enjoy intimate connections, seek out assistance, and so on, depending on their attachment style.
We don’t recall much about this stage of development since our attachment styles are formed so early, and we don’t have influence over it. As a result, our attachment tendencies are often unconscious and automatic. We may find ourselves repeating the same unhealthy patterns again and again in our relationships with ourselves and others.
Since awareness is the first step toward change, we requested our students to complete an attachment questionnaire quiz this week to help them determine their attachment style.
https://quiz.attachmentproject.com/
Our goal is for students to identify the type of attachment style they have and see whether this has an impact on their current relationships. If they see a link which needs to be shifted or changed, they then have the enlightenment to do so.
On Wednesday we had a lovely Oriental Food evening and enjoyed it outside in the warm weather. We welcomed an outside chef to cater this delicious offering.
We have now reached the 5th Pillar of our Wellbeing Programme. We are focusing on Making Safe and Responsible Choices.
In the Boarding Assembly we introduced the key takeaway points of:
• Time in: how do you connect with inner world?
• Attachment figures: how our attachment style influences the way we make our decisions?
This week we will focus on Time in!
What we experience in our inner world, which includes our feelings, thoughts, perceptions, memories, beliefs, hopes, dreams, desires, motivations, longings etc, can occur even without us being aware of it. The lack of self-awareness entails the failure to see the patterns in our behaviours and thinking. As a result, we risk making choices that are not aligned with what we really are and with what we really want.
On the contrary, when we develop the habit to pay attention to these inner experiences we become more self-aware. This can help us have more control over the decisions and choices we make and prevent us from being at the mercy of our own feelings, desires and external negative pressure.
This weekend we had another action packed offering of activities in our Weekend Programme. The students had the choice of Tennis, Cooking, Horse Riding, Woodcraft, Photography, Running, Climbing, Golf, Music Club, Nature Walk, Chess, Boxercise, Baking and a trip by boat to Yvoire.
On Wednesday we had our weekly international dinner. This week we enjoyed the cuisine from Japan.
This is Week 4 of the Online Safety Pillar
We focused on Online Balance
Our daily lives involve us needing to use screens and go online. It is now a necessity for work, staying in contact with friends and even shopping. But where the imbalance occurs is when we become obsessed with it. How many of us are guilty of checking our phones first thing in the morning when we awake, or turning to them for entertainment when we find ourselves with a few minutes to spare. We need to guide our students to not depend on their electronics. We would all benefit from a detachment from the draw of apps whose sole purpose is to profit from us staying online longer. Check your own stats to see how many hours of phone usage you have had this week.
One of the challenges of this Pillar was for the students to do a Phone Detox – Could you?
This is Week 3 of the Online Safety Pillar
We focused on “Your Online Live”
Every parent is concerned about their children meeting strangers or new people in life and whether they will be a good influence. However, less thought is given to the hundreds, thousands or sometimes millions of strangers that are viewing their pictures, profiles or online presence. With the multitude of online influencers who share their life online, young people have been conditioned to aspire to this. We now have a generation that post their pictures and videos online for all to see. As part of this generational change, it is our job as parents and educators to question this, keep them safe and guide them. We need to help them have perspective that chasing a ‘Like’ is not a worthy desire when the consequence may be their safety.
This is Week 2 of the Online Safety Pillar
We focused on “What you post … in that moment”
The goal is to make students aware that what they post can have consequences. When we make a funny comment; or create a meme from a friends picture; or post a video of our friends doing something silly – all of these can have consequences in that moment, but also for the future. What we post online stays online forever without our control of what happens after we post it. Not only can it emotionally affect our friends, but it could also be seen by others.
This week we started Pillar 4 of our Wellbeing Programme.
We introduced the Pillar this week in our Monthly Assembly. Our students spend a lot of their time online whether as part of their academics, social life or indeed free time. It is therefore important we aid them with the right tools to navigate this online world just as we do in the real world. It is important they are educated not only on the benefits of technology but also on their responsibility of protecting themselves and others.
