Year 7

This week we are continuing our focus on friendships.

Each week the Year 7 locker space is decorated with a new acrostic friendship poem, planting a seed in their heads of the multitude of ways friendship manifests itself. The ultimate question is what kind of friend are you?

Take some time this week to discuss your daughter’s friendships with them. Do you know who their friends are? Have they changed recently? How are the girls communicating with each other? 

It is tough in this, (dare I sound like an old person and say), modern world, for the girls to feel they only have one way to communicate, and that is through social media, when there are so many more productive and connective ways to converse. Does your daughter have more data credit than call credit on their phone? Might it be best to challenge this as a preference, would it not be best for them to speak with each other? Are they meeting up after school? Heading to the movies, heading off to the shops after sport or even heading out to lunch or dinner? All these ways are more personal and beneficial to group dynamics and social wellbeing, especially when more people can attend. Why? 

This week the girls are working towards understanding tone, body language, word choice and inference when communicating with each other. All these factors can be misread so easily when dialogue is in written form. How many times have you yourself gone to post a comment, or write an email and thought better of your “light hearted joke” or your word choice, and sometimes even your emoji choice? When you reflect and edit, you are doing so with an adult brain and a wealth of experience that our 12 year olds don’t possess yet. Their ability to self-edit written tone is very new and can sometimes land poorly and incorrectly on the recipient, causing more damage to the relationship than they intended.  

Encourage the girls to chat, to talk, to explain and to share in a personal face to face space, maybe use that data for a Facetime chat instead of a TikTok post. 

Cementing positive bonds with each other through effective communication at this stage of their schooling and personal development is so important to their relational development and creates the basis of how they will communicate outside the safety of their friendship circles and into the future.

– Kylie Bickerstaff
Head of Year 7

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