Supporting your child with building their self esteem – Part 2

*Please read Part 1 of our Mindscreen Experience before reading this blog post*

We have had the pleasure of taking part in the Mindscreen Experience with our 10 year old son.   In part one, we completed the free self esteem test and began the Full Mindscreen Experience.  Following on from answering several questions about personality, thoughts and feelings and gave an insight into my son’s outlook on himself, we learnt a lot about himself and how he perceives himself.  From this, we can begin to support his journey with this.

As I mentioned in my last post, we were given several documents following on from completing the first part of the Mindscreen Experience.  One of these documents was the Profile, sharing a full and detailed outcome of the assessment and how my son can use this information with the upcoming lesson plans.

Within this document was also a detailed table and a graph showing the difference areas of his personality.

We also have the PLS (personalised learning style) information to use as well as the LIG (learning improvement graph).  Both these documents are really useful when moving forward with the lesson plans as it shares the best possible way to approach your child’s learning style and the areas that need improvement (all this information is pulled from the beginning of the assessment that your child completes).

Mindscreen lesson Plans 1-4

We now decided to move on to the first set of the lesson plans.  When navigating around the Mindscreen website, you’ll notice that the lessons are under the teaching and learning resources section.  For each lesson, there is some notes for you to read through prior to completing.  I was quite surprised to see that following on from the experience we’ve already completed online, that the lessons are actually offline and are available to print (bear that in mind if you don’t have a printer!)  To make our lives a lot easier, I printed everything off in advance and stuck all the worksheets in a folder, ready to use when we wished.

Lesson 1: easyAwareness

The object of this lesson is to offer your child the opportunity to learn about their own personal characteristics and begin to build their self awareness.   Mindscreen recommend that during this time your child spends completing the lesson, they are listening to calming and positive music.   This lesson is really helpful when it comes to pinpointing what they know about themselves and how others see them.   It asks your child to focus on what they have learnt from the natural behaviours that have been selected on their profile and how that makes them feel.   It was also super interesting to see what 6 words my son used to best describe himself!  The lesson finishes up with what they have learnt about themselves following on from the above activity which I found useful when following on from the learning from his profile and how he has extracted that information for himself!

Lesson 2: easyBelief

Lesson 2 of the Mindscreen experience is all about self belief and getting your child to learn ways in which to believe in themselves and the influence of these.  As part of this lesson, we focused on the ‘dog story’ (which is available in the parent section of the lesson) and how sometime our beliefs are formed by our thoughts, experiences, and emotions. The more often we have the same thought, experience, and emotion, the stronger our belief becomes even if it is negative.  But how do we move about from the negativity of this?

It asks your child to focus on something they believe they are good at – in our instance it is playing football.  The lesson focuses on asking your child to write down what they are good at and listing why they think this, with a huge focus on positivity.  It then gets your child to think about their behaviour stemming from this belief.  Next, we discussed people who have achieved certain things in their life and who has impressed him (a few footballers were named) but it was lovely to hear some personal reasons too.  It was great to see how the lesson also takes a focus on how sometimes we may struggle to achieve certain things and what we can do in that instance and how we defeat the ‘ah-but’ moments.

Lesson 3: easyConfidence

The objective of this lesson is to give your child the opportunity to explore their own strengths and talents and build their self-confidence (something we all need reminding from time to time!)  The lesson focuses on ‘My invisible rope’ and how we can look unconfident and confident depending on our posture.  We focused on the differences and how our body language can really show it.

We then focused on recent achievements and how it made him feel in terms of confidence.   We touched upon our strengths and weaknesses and how working in a team can better support this in people.

We finished off this lesson with some positivity statements which was lovely to do together.  It’s a good ideas to refer back to the profile and ‘about me’ section here to support them.

Lesson 4: easySkills

This is a fantastic lesson where your child will learn about their unique skills and what makes them the person they are.   With support and guidance from his profile, we were able to complete the tasks around skills that he felt he was good at and in what capacity he had used them in.   As I mentioned, my son absolutely loves football and therefore he applied his skills to this activity.  What we also learned was that the skills used in football can also be applied to many other activities.  This is a fantastic way to show children that their skills don’t just apply to one activity in their lives.

What we have learnt so far

Spending time together is so important.  And as children grow, it seems that that time becomes more precious.  So it has been a real pleasure to spend this time with my eldest and do the activities together.  It is worth a note that this isn’t something that your child can just crack on with independently.  It really is beniifical that you as a carer or parent take part and enjoy the full Mindscreen experience together.  It is also lovely to know that these lessons and notes are kept offline in a bid to encourage them to write down their thoughts and feelings and access them when they wish.

Look out for my next and final instalment of our Mindsecreen experience where we will share our experience of lessons 5-9!

Thanks for reading xxx