Director’s Blog – Lisa Charlotte Davis
So we thought we’d share a little glimpse from inside the toolkits, but also of the fab insights that have come out of our evaluation of the test delivery in which our lush creative practitioners ran the sessions with our partner schools and youth groups.
First up is Sometimes it Hurts, our illustrated story series that features 6 fictionalised accounts of young people describing something that hurts in their home / family situation and its impact on their lives, friendships, learning and wellbeing.
Below you can see a map created by a Year 6 child who was using different colours and mark-making to depict the world of our character Ted. What we absolutely love about this example is that it shows the nuance in understanding of emotion and the complexity of experience that this young person has developed through the course of the programme.
Whilst the programme focuses on interrogating the experiences of our fictional characters, imagine how empowering this would be for a young person who themselves is experiencing something tricky, to find that they now have the language to be able to explain to a trusted adult what is happening for them and how it is affecting them.
Children who participated in our programme told us:
💬 “It’s easier for me to learn [with the story].”
💬 “Listening to the stories helps you understand it…analysing the stories helps you understand it more.”
Teachers said:
💬 “I felt like the children had a deep understanding of kind of the different qualities that make a healthy or unhealthy relationship, and kind of just like the little nuances.“
💬 “They felt more enabled, more able to trust their own judgement… an increased feeling of self belief in making decisions.“
💬 “Quieter children that dont normally kind of share any responses or speak up to the class were sharing their thoughts, and I felt like its because they could relate to the content and obviously had that creativity.“
💬 “Children demonstrated better self-expression and self-understanding: Like the first week, feelings, happy, sad and that was about it. By week six, we had, like, anxious, overwhelmed, like furious… dysregulated, and they still use those words.“
💬 “It’s given her confidence, because she’s been allowed to have some useful language to name and describe her experience, rather than it just being, oh, that’s my experience.”
It’s been a huge HUGE amount of work for our little team to pull these toolkits together (massive shout out to Sarah Stamp Lucy Engelhart Megan Watson as well as Kate) but boy are we proud of what we have developed.
Welcome to the new cohort of Primary teachers we met today 🤩
