Last term we were very fortunate to have a visit from Andrew Fuller which was made possible by the support of the PSA at St. Joseph’s.

A session on building learning strengths was held for staff and then an evening presentation was held for parents to attend. The evening session was based around building resilience in children.  It was great to see so many parents taking advantage of his expertise and coming along to the night.

Andrew is a Clinical Psychologist who has written several books and worked with over 500,000 young people nationwide. I have included some key points from Andrew below.

 How to Build Resilience

Compassion and love are our oldest medicines. Add to this hope and connectedness and we have the four most powerful ingredients of healing. Each ingredient alone may not cure a case of the flu but together they will help you resist disease, lower stress, lower blood pressure, avoid a heart attack, protect against depression, increase academic results and longevity and help you live a happier life.

What creates resilience varies at different stages of our lives.

The clear indication is that people thrive when they:

Connect with one another

Protect one another

Respect one another

CPR

Identifying Learning Strengths

Helping students to identify their learning strengths and helping teachers to differentiate based on these strengths is called neurodevelopmental differentiation.

A tool to enable students to do this is available at www.mylearningstrengths.com

Students and their parents can assess learning strengths for free on www.mylearningstrengths.com and receive a letter outlining their top learning strengths and an area to overcome.

By identifying learning strengths, you can capitalize on success in that area and cross-fertilize those skills into other learning areas. While the letter that is sent after the completion of the learning strengths analysis will be sufficient for many people, a full report is also available. There is a nominal fee for this.

Andrew recommended that if your child is under grade 3 then parents would need do the online test.