Adventures and Acceptance

With great gusto the children have been embracing imaginative adventures. In the last week, we have had a visit from the Minions, whose space rocket crash landed which meant our Year 2 children are busy building them new ones; the witch from Room on the Broom, who dropped all her belongings in the Walled Garden (fear not the Year 1s retrieved them all for her), and rumour has it the Year 4 children have found dragon eggs! One thing we can always be certain of is that the imagination of children is boundless for as long as we let it be. Fun and creativity fuel learning and it is the magic that enables friendships to grow through games on the playground.

Yet as we grow older our self-doubt and cynicism also grows and it starts to push out our ability to be free with our imaginations. Through our Key Stage 2 Monday School meetings we continue to give space for discussing the importance of self-belief, of being open to change and how to be kind to ourselves. At school we understand our role is a holistic one, meaning it is the whole child that we must know and develop including their ability to cope when life gets bumpy. This week we considered how to deal with things that are outside of our control and focused on some acceptance statements. Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, gave many teachings including The Four Noble Truths. In very simple form these truths are:

1st Noble Truth: Sometimes people feel unhappy.
2nd Noble Truth: Sometimes what makes people unhappy is not getting what they want, or getting something they don’t want.
3rd Noble Truth: The way to stop being unhappy is to give up wanting what we cannot have or don’t need.
4th Noble Truth: The way to give up wanting the wrong things is to follow the Buddha’s way and to be kind and helpful to others.

We spotlighted the 3rd Noble Truth which is especially difficult when everyday we see a world full of shiny new things which we want to possess and ‘perfect’ lives that we want to live. To help us loosen our desire to control everything in our lives we looked at three acceptance statements:

I can’t change what has already happened.

Sometimes things don’t go my way, and that is okay.

I can’t predict the future and I am alright with that.

And finally a fourth statement to remind us that we do have control (or at least our children are learning to have control) over ourselves:

How I react in this situation is what I can control in this moment.

Of course the children were able to come up with even more statements that would help them focus on positivity whilst relinquishing the desire to have everything they want. We are proud of the children at Brentwood Prep who everyday play and work well together and are developing the necessary resilience to navigate adult life.