During these two weeks of Personal Growth courses, the third graders at Puxi campus learned important lessons about emotional management.

On November 9th, under the guidance of teachers, the children focused on how to face frustration. Everyone connected with their past experiences and recalled how they behaved when they were feeling frustrated at that time. From the discussion, the children understood that emotions are neither good nor bad. Instead, they're messengers that can signal something important we need to pay attention to. If we can adjust our emotions in time and learn from them, it can be considered a success. When faced with frustration, we can calm down, take a deep breath, and count down numbers, or think about the things we can control in this matter, and then we will find that everything which had bothered us has drifted away.

On November 16th, the children learned how to cope with worry. Everyone's worries are different, but in that day's class, the children learned how to quickly distinguish between useful worries and spinning worries. A useful worry can prevent you from getting into danger, and help us better prepare for what might happen next. A spinning worry would take your imagination to think a lot of negative thoughts or even fill you with self-doubt and prevent you from trying things and having fun. As long as we can correctly distinguish these feelings and take action, then worry cannot defeat us.

We believe that children can become the masters of their own emotions through practicing what they have learned in these PG sessions again and again. They have now grasped some new tools to help them know how to discover the emergence of negative emotions and how to escape the quagmire of negative thoughts and self-doubt.

Written by: Everly He

Pictures by: SHSID Support Group

Edited by: Serene Yang, Niall Keenan