Kerry ETB
Killorglin Community College

Wellbeing

Wellbeing

Tutor Time

Tutor Time Activities take place at the end of each term. Tutors get the opportunity to spend more time with their tutor groups and do fun activities with them. The objective of Tutor Time is to finish every term on a positive note and tutor time activities help foster relationships and promote wellbeing. Examples of what happens during Tutor Time include having the chats with tea and biscuits, Kahoot! Quizzes and games of “Heads Up” to name a few. We also have been known to treat our exam classes to some pizza! School closures didn’t stop us either, we continued on and went virtual with fun online activities! This time is enjoyed by all and everyone looks forward to it!


LGBTI+ Anti Bullying Stand Up Awareness Week November 2020

Our first LGBTI+ Anti Bullying Stand Up Awareness Week was held during the week beginning Monday 16th until Friday 20th November 2020. In Killorglin Community College, we are an inclusive and diverse school. This week raised awareness and educated us to take a stand and say no to homophobic, biphobic and transphobic bullying. As part of this week, Tim Nolan, the Kerry ETB Wellbeing Coordinator along with the teachers of SPHE, RSE, Guidance and CSPE Classes and members of the Student Support Team led the initiative within the classrooms as well as outside the classrooms. Students made beautiful posters to display around the school and a non-uniform “Rainbow Day” was also held at the end of the week. Each year group as well as staff members wore colours of the rainbow to show support to the LGBTI+ Community

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Feel Goof February Challenge, 2021

We wanted to encourage the whole school community to stay active during the period of school closure because physical activity is known to help promote wellbeing and positive mental health. We felt the long days with online learning and teaching as well as having no in person social contact with friends was very difficult and people’s mental health was suffering. During the month of February, we held the Feel Good February Challenge virtually. We challenged all students, staff, parents/guardians and followers of our social media platforms to do a 100km walking or running challenge throughout the month. Participants walked/ran almost a massive 6000km between them!

We had prizes for those who clocked up the most kilometres over the course of the month. The winners were:

Staff Member: Aisling O’Dwyer with a whopping 463.45km!

Junior Student: Alannah Dempsey, 2nd Year, 187.1km

Senior Student: Aoilbhe Mangan, 6th Year, 288.66km

Parent: Breda Sheahan, 258.88km

Congratulations to our winners and to all who took part!

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YSI Virtual Wellbeing Series

The Virtual Wellbeing Series was the brainchild of the 2020/2021 Transition Year’s Young Social Innovators project, Connect and Express: Empathy in the School Community. Their central goal was to decrease anxiety and increase empathy by strengthening the bonds in the school community. When Lockdown interrupted their planned actions, they adapted to meet the needs of the school community and developed the Virtual Wellbeing Series. Read their own thoughts on the process and its impact in this excerpt from their YSI Report.

With Lockdown 3, we had to put many of our actions on hold. Many of us were struggling to engage online, feeling tired and unmotivated. We felt that other students must be experiencing the same. We came up with the idea of a Virtual Wellbeing Series to try to offer students something to engage with, that would strengthen the bonds within class groups and with tutors, one of our core goals. It took place over two weeks with over 80 suggested activities, daily challenges and bonus events such as a whole school quiz and Zumba and mental health talks by Jigsaw and SHINE. These are all displayed on this Padlet:https://padlet.com/samantha_nagle/uwqf6mie8oqocif1.

There was a lot of preparation involved. We had to come up with ideas, develop a social media pack to promote them, arrange guest speakers, get agreement from teachers and the principal and get the students to buy into it by making it competitive. We also had to work with the principal to allocate funding for the prizes. During the project, we had to send out daily emails, encourage students to get involved, keep track of challenges, run Live Events.”

“The VWS was a response to the struggles of students in lockdown. We used Jigsaw’s 5-a-day for mental health to categorise our ideas: Keep Learning, Be Active, Take Notice, Give and Connect with Others. Each day consisted of five activities such as the daily challenge, an inspirational quote, a guided meditation and a healthy recipe. During the event, the fun, banter and excitement made us all proud.

We did a survey after our VWS had concluded and we got some amazing, positive answers. For example, people said that it gave them a break from normal schoolwork and that it took people's minds off the current climate that the world is in. Some people were finding it very hard to concentrate on schoolwork, but the daily challenges gave them small goals that made them feel more motivated to do homework. Others found the engagement with classmates enjoyable since they couldn’t speak to them in school. One of the 6th year students said, “I loved how it was a competition that encouraged people to participate and the teamwork was lovely and the end product (our 6a video) that we all have for life now and it was a bit emotional watching it knowing it was our last year in the school together.” The principal and several teachers want to make it a yearly event with weekly challenges. We think it’s nice to think that our response to lockdown may have created something that will have an impact on the school for years to come.”

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Langford Street, Killorglin, Co. Kerry.
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