From the Assistant Principal
Friendology
St Matthew’s is proud to be a URSTRONG school. URSTRONG provides a friendship skills curriculum, Friendology 101, that helps students establish and maintain healthy relationships, manage conflict with kindness, and increase their overall resilience.
Student conflict can be classified into two categories: Friendship Fires & Mean-on-Purpose Behaviour. Most conflicts at primary school are Friendship Fires. These are normal, low-level friendship issues like misunderstandings, hurt feelings, and disagreements. Friendship Fires occur, for example, when a friend forgets your birthday or suddenly changes the rules of a game and says, “Ha! Ha! You’re out!” or when a friend asks someone else to be their work partner.
Mean-on-Purpose Behaviour is far less common but happens from time to time. It is intentionally rude, cruel, or malicious behaviour that’s intended to hurt feelings, and it’s important that our children know how to deal with it when it happens. Here are the steps we encourage students to use:
- Say a Quick Comeback in a firm voice. This is a short statement that works in all Mean-on-Purpose moments. It’s not mean and is said assertively: “Not cool!” “Excuse me.” “That’s not very kind.” “Woah!” “That’s unacceptable.”
- Immediately walk away. If you don’t, things might escalate, and you might say/do something you shouldn’t!
- Report to a grown-up. Give the grown-up just the facts. We don’t report to ‘dob’ or ‘tattle’ – it’s just to provide the adult with information.
We encourage you to join URSTRONG for free and support our school by sharing the same messages and teaching the same skills that we teach here at St Matthew’s. URSTRONG provides simple but meaningful language and skills to open up a dialogue with your children. You can join URSTRONG for free at https://urstrong.com/.
Petra Cole
Assistant Principal ┃Child Safe Advocate┃Classroom Support Teacher