Lessons Learned from Zippy and Apple

March 23, 2021 Web Admin

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Casa, Learning Support, Lower Elementary

This week sees the Casa Year 3/Kindergarten and Lower Elementary children saying goodbye to their friends, Zippy and Apple, for this school year. We have spent the past seven months getting to know these two very special friends who have taught us so much about feelings, communication, friendship, conflict, change and loss, and developing coping skills.

The children’s commitment and engagement was crucial to the success of the Zippy and Apple’s Friends Social and Emotional Literacy Program; their interest and enthusiasm allowed them to learn many things, from building and maintaining solid friendships to solving a variety of day-to-day problems.

While we engaged in a range of different activities every week, including story-telling, drawing, games, activities, and role-play, the children especially enjoyed the opportunity for talk and discussion, where they spoke about real-life issues that they had encountered and what strategies they used to solve them. Classmates were invited to contribute further solutions to help their friends if they wished. From these conversations, it is clear that the children had used their learning from the past few months to cope with different situations. As the children were encouraged to apply their learning from our sessions to their everyday life both at home and at school, it was important to consistently use the language of the program in classrooms and to encourage the children to chat about our sessions with their families at home. Hopefully, these conversations will continue.

Last week, I asked the children to reflect on our sessions from the past few months and identify one thing they have learned. The following is a selection of their answers: