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School & Career

Tips for Moving to a New School

Moving to a new school is always scary, whether you’re moving from primary school to high school or into a new school in a different area. What can you do to make it easier?

My kids are old hands at this because they’ve moved school so often, even going into schools in a new country where they haven’t known the language. We’ve lived in Germany, Switzerland and UK and they’ve been to local schools speaking German, French and English. It wasn’t ever easy but they’ve made great friends who they still keep in touch with now that they’ve moved on.

I asked them for their advice on moving to a new school.

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12 Steps to Becoming a Self-Confident Kid

Do you ever wish you were more confident? Do you watch other kids standing in front of the class, and presenting their work, and wish you be that self-confident kid?

We often talk about self-confidence and self-esteem in tweens. These two are linked, but slightly different. Self-esteem is about how you feel about yourself, how you value your abilities and yourself. Self-confidence is about how you feel about your abilities, about trusting yourself to do something.

You could have a high self-esteem generally, but have low self-confidence in a particular area, e.g. doing maths, or standing in front of the classroom and presenting a book report.

We often split people into ‘confident’ and ‘not confident’, but we can all learn to be more confident. It just takes a bit of practice. Here are our top tips for increasing self-confidence and self-esteem!

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What is the Difference Between Introvert and Extrovert?

What is the difference between introvert and extrovert? And which one are you?

What does an INTROVERT look like?

Photo by Kinga Cichewicz on Unsplash

Introverts tend to be people who are most comfortable in their own company or spending time with a small, familiar group of friends. They are analytical in their thinking, like to have all of the available facts to hand before making a decision and are probably a little bit uncomfortable when forced into the limelight. Introverts think before they speak.

What does an EXTROVERT look like?

Photo by Luke Porter on Unsplash

Extroverts, on the other hand, think as they speak! They’re happy to take centre stage, love to talk about anything and everything that comes to mind, are happy being part of a large group and make fast decisions. Extroverts are less happy in their own company and tend to get bored without someone around to keep them amused.

In short, introverts are often described as being energised by enjoying time spent alone with their thoughts, whereas extroverts recharge their batteries by being in a roomful of equally extroverted people!

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Good Relationships – Healthy Relationships – Tips for Kids

Relationships are hard at any age. Remember that we don’t just talk about relationships when we mean a boyfriend or a girlfriend – it’s about how you get on with your parents, your friends and other people important to you.

There are certain basic ideas that are important to developing good relationships; you master these and life suddenly becomes a lot less stressful! Alice Hoyle has some ideas that may help you have better relationships with the people in your life.

Communication

Image by Robert Collins on Unsplash

Communication is the most important aspect of any relationship. Sharing things with people in your life is important. We do this mostly by speaking and listening. It is important to share how you feel about things and to listen and try to understand how others feel about things (this is called empathy).

How good are you at both talking AND listening? If you favour doing only one of them in a relationship then this isn’t as balanced as it could be- you probably need to work on doing both and so should the other person.

Also sometimes people might say something but their body language (how someone uses their body or their facial expression) maybe saying something different. Take some time to consider what is your body language saying when you talk? What is their body language saying? Do you make eye contact when you talk?

A key to successful communication is to use “I” statements instead of “you” statements- eg. “I feel sad when you call me silly” is better than “You calling me silly makes me sad” because the second one can put the person on the defensive straight away and the conversation can go badly after that.