Supporting Healthy Lives: Student Wellbeing Programs at Larrakeyah Primary
Larrakeyah Primary School is a Top 10 School in the World’s Best School Prizes for 2022. Shortlisted in the ‘Supporting Healthy Lives’ category, the award aims to recognise and support schools who are providing opportunities for students and the wider community to live healthy – and inspire others to do the same.
Today, we recap our integrated approach to student health and development across our student wellbeing programs: YouHue, Friends at Break, Physical Education and Cooking & Gardening programs.
Wellbeing programs are designed to work together to promote physical and mental wellbeing in students and provide insight for teachers and staff to monitor and respond to how year groups, classes, and individual students are doing across the school.
YouHue
YouHue is an app that gives students a safe space for daily reflection on how they are feeling and allows teachers to respond to trends in emotional wellbeing quickly.
Monitoring student wellbeing has traditionally been done through periodic surveys. The challenge has always been timing. While a survey can return a snapshot of overall student wellbeing, that snapshot is weeks or months old by the time it reaches teachers and does not provide granular insight into individual students.
With the successful introduction of YouHue to Larrakeyah Primary in 2021, the app is now in use throughout the school from Transition to Year 6.
A daily ‘check-in’ gives students a moment to pause, reflect, and put words to their moods and emotions. Teachers are able to see how their class is feeling today, and over time, making it much easier to spot trends and respond to potential learning challenges that individual students may be facing.
Friends at Break
A simple but effective program, Friends at Break encourages students to develop friendships with their peers during recess. Every day, a Friends at Break session is held in the library where students are able to play games and interact together with adult supervision.
Sessions for Early Childhood students are available on Tuesdays and Thursdays, with sessions for Middle and Upper Primary students run on Mondays and Wednesdays.
Physical Education and Cooking & Gardening
Physical education promotes general wellbeing, resilience, and success in school and life. In addition to movement and motor skills, the Physical Education Program aims to develop fitness, self discipline, and self confidence and esteem.
Understanding where food comes from, how it’s grown, prepared, and developing good nutritional habits are life-long skills. The Cooking & Gardening Program encourages sustainable practices to balance what people need and the environment.
While the physical wellbeing benefits of both programs are clear, outdoor activity and healthy eating play a major role in the mental wellbeing of students and their academic performance.
The Cooking & Gardening Program is also regularly integrated with other disciplines as part of our STEAM focus – providing unique opportunities to practice and apply skills in other areas (such as ICT) to the real-world context of growing plants.
Student wellbeing at Larrakeyah Primary
Wellbeing includes both the emotional and physical state of a person, and can have a dramatic effect on all areas of their life – including academic performance. Wellbeing programs help students develop skills to understand themselves, get along with others, and foster a healthy environment at school and beyond.
