This leaflet gives a general idea of what an ELSA works on with children. It shows how a lesson may be run which includes and emotional check in, main activity, relaxation and a review. It looks at the aims of the ELSA programme such as building your child’s emotional development and to help them cope with life’s challenges. Also helping children to find solutions to any problems they may have. It covers the areas an ELSA may help with such as loss and bereavement, emotional literacy, self esteem, social skills, friendship issues, relationships, managing strong feelings, anxiety, bullying, conflict, emotional regulation, growth mindset and social stories.
It is helpful to give one of these leaflets out to parents when you first start working with them.
This Rise and Thrive Teen self-esteem intervention is suitable for pupils in secondary. It may also be useful for mature year 6 pupils. It is a group intervention for approximately 6 pupils. It could be run whole class too.
Self-esteem refers to how a person views and values themselves. It involves having a positive opinion about your own worth, abilities, and qualities. When someone has healthy self-esteem, they feel confident, capable, and deserving of love and respect. Self-esteem is important because it influences how you perceive yourself, how you interact with others, how you handle challenges in life and your mental wellbeing.
An estimate of timings would be:
Review last time and check in 10 minutes
Activity 30 minutes
Review 5 minutes
Next time 5 minutes
Make sure you have 50 minutes to an hour to run the intervention.
There are six sessions to this intervention which will all help to raise self-esteem.
Boosters and drainers – pupils will explore what boosts self-esteem and what drains self-esteem
Strengths and talents -pupils will explore their strengths and talents
Challenging negative self-talk – pupils will learn how to reframe their negative dialogue
Building resilience – pupils will explore how to build their resilience by facing challenges and setbacks
Healthy and unhealthy relationships – pupils will explore relationships
Impact of self-care – pupils will learn the importance of self-care and the impact that has on self-esteem
Included in the Rise and Thrive teen self-esteem intervention:
Planning booklet with 6 fully planned sessions
Self-esteem scale for scaling at the beginning and end of the intervention
Lesson 1 – 36 Booster and drainer cards, Booster and drainer worksheet, emotions and self esteem visual
Lesson 2 – 40 strength cards, Building my strengths worksheet
Lesson 3 – Inner dialogue list for prompting, Challenging my inner dialogue worksheet
Lesson 4 – Resilience diary – front cover and one sheet to be copied multiple times
Lesson 5 – 8 prompts cards for relationships, Profile of a healthy relationship worksheet
Lesson 6 – Self care plan worksheet
This EBSA workbook School difficulties has been created with valuable help from the members of the ELSA Support Facebook Group who provided some of the difficulties their pupils face. It relies on real life situations that pupils have found difficult about coming to school. ELSAs are often on the front line trying to help pupils back into school and to work on their difficulties.
The booklet is aimed from Year 3 to Year 6 but could also be used with Year 2 with support.
We also have EBSA workbook school thoughts and feelings and EBSA Workbook Coping with school worries on the website.
EBSA is Emotionally based school avoidance. Pupils who struggle to come to school or are non attenders. This might have an emotional cause or a mental health cause.
The activity consists of a sorting board, cards with suggestions, cards for pupils to write their own, an exploration board, a feelings board with scales and changes and what they want to happen to make things feel ok.
This activity will help pupils to identify what is bothering them at school and how to reduce that feeling by changing the situation.
Start by printing out the base board and cutting up the cards. Print out a blank sheet so the pupil can add their own if they want to. Help the pupil sort the cards between things that are ok, things they are unsure of and things that are not ok.
Once you have done that choose one of the things that are not ok and look at it further.
Help the pupil break it down to see if you can find out what the actual issue is.
Example might be ‘seating plan’ that is not ok.
What is it about the seating plan that is not ok? Is it that they are sitting next to someone they don’t like? Perhaps they can’t hear the teacher? Perhaps they are uncomfortable and there might be a draft or a bright light bothering them. They might prefer to be sitting with a friend. Perhaps someone copies off them or talks to them and they don’t like that. Try and help the pupil to break down the difficulty.
Once they have the root cause of their difficulty, help them to identify how it makes them feel. Can they put a name to that feeling? How big is that feeling?
There is a sheet for pupil voice to say what changes need to happen for them to be ok. They can write it or you can write it for them and they can tell you what needs to change. There is also a daily sheet for pupils to write down anything that they think of or that crops up for them.
There are also some additional supporting resources included in the pack
This is the first workbook in the EBSA Workbook Range.
This is an anger support plan resource pack for older pupils who need help with anger. Perfect for ELSA SUPPORT. The plan is a useful reminder for them and others on what they need to look out for, do, or remember when their feelings of anger get too much. The resource is aimed at upper KS2 and Secondary. The plan is meant to be worked through with an adult. When pupils are angry they need that all important one to one or small group support. Helping pupils to manage their anger is the end result of all the work you do with them. The plan must be done with the worksheet pack .
Included in the anger support plan pack
Fillable form version of the support plan – pupils can fill this in on the computer
PDF form for printing and writing out by hand
9 worksheets working through all the points on the plan
3 information sheets with examples of thought challenging questions, assertiveness script and body signs
The 9 worksheets and activities included are:
Anger triggers
Body signs
What makes anger worse?
What do I need when feeling angry?
Where is my safe place?
Questions to challenge anger
What might distract me?
Who can I talk to?
What coping strategies can I use?
This is our Coping skills toolkit for emotional regulation. Perfect for ELSA Support. There is a handy little pouch and lots of resources that will help pupils with their emotional regulation.
Each pupil could be given one of these. Go through the cards and decide which emojis to put in and which calming cards to put in. Each pupil could have their own bespoke toolkit.
Included in the coping skills toolkit
24 Emoji face cards
33 Coping, calming and mindfulness cards
Worry tree card
Circle of control card
Affirmations card
Anger feeling words and physical sensations card
Sadness feeling words and physical sensations card
Anxiety feeling words and physical sensations card
Scared feeling words and physical sensations words
Self care for wellbeing card
All these resources are in one handy file so you can print what you need.
Self-esteem is about how we value and perceive ourselves.
There are 24 sheets in the teen self-esteem pack covering the following areas:
Top strengths – What are the pupil’s top strengths?
A strength you wish for – What do they aspire to? What strength would they like?
Using strengths – How do they use their strengths?
Strength spotter – Do they recognise strengths in others?
Affirmations – read
Affirmations – write
3 good things today – What three good things have happened today? This is a daily practice that will boost wellbeing and self-esteem
Steps to success – read
Steps to success – write
Self love
Make yourself proud – What makes them feel proud?
Helping hand – How do they help others?
Fill your cup
Gratefulness – What are they grateful for?
Jar of positivity
Mood tracker – Track their mood daily
Selfie challenge
Social media feelings
A to Z of things that make me happy
A to Z of words to describe me
Wishes and dreams
Build relationships – What does a perfect friend look like? What qualities do they have?
Being assertive – read
Being assertive – write
This is a Feeling worried story pack for helping children who might need a little help understanding worries.
Included in the Feeling worried story pack:
Front cover with space for a name and a three page story with images
32 coping strategy cards
The idea of this resource is to use the story and resources to help pupils understand how to deal with worries.
This is a Feeling angry story pack for helping children who might need a little help with managing their anger.
Included in the Feeling angry story pack:
Front cover with space for a name and an 8 page story
24 Coping cards
The idea of this resource is to use the story and resources to help pupils understand how to deal with anger.
The story covers:
Triggers
Anger volcano
Body signs
Vocabulary around anger
Labelling the feeling
Scaling the feeling
Changing thoughts
Looking at something from a different perspective
Breathing techniques
Consequences of anger
It would be best to do a little at a time of the booklet so you can discuss it in detail and talk about the child’s experiences.
This is a Christmas wishes stocking booklet. Pupils can either choose a mindful colouring version or they can choose a coloured version. The aim of the activity is mindfulness and thinking about Christmas wishes.
Once the stocking is coloured, cut out and folded, pupils can write or draw their wishes inside the stocking.
This would make a fab display,
This is an idea for an ELSA Christmas advent calendar and would be a fab activity for groups of children or your one to one children. Each child can colour one or two of the booklets. Some of them require faces drawing on first. They can just colour the image or they can colour the image and background. Depends how much time you have. There are 24 little foldable books. The child can colour the front of one of the books and then write or draw something inside.
The pupil needs to understand that what they write or draw could be seen by anyone so they are writing for an audience. What could they write?
The purpose of this advent calendar is some quiet mindful time and of course positivity. This activity is ideal for that last week in November, preparing for the 1st of December.
Ideas for what you could work on:
A Christmas memory
Something you are grateful for
An act of kindness
Positive quotes about Christmas
Self care and ways to look after yourself
Positive characteristics
Relaxing moments
Positive affirmations
A gift to give someone
A joke or something to make you smile
Compliments
Once all the pieces have been coloured you can use the enclosed A3 sheet to stick the numbers on at random and close each book with a bit of bluetak. You can then use it as an advent calendar. Everyone has been involved and pupils are writing things for others to see so they need to think carefully what message they want to convey.
Of course if you want to make it very simple, they could just draw a Christmas picture inside if they want to.
This is an odd socks anti bullying poster I made for anti bullying week. It prints on A3 so is a decent size. If you want it bigger use your Adobe print settings and choose poster. You can then alter the tile scale to make it bigger.
It reminds us all that socks come in all colours and patterns and they are all different and unique.
This is a Christmas compliments cup activity.
Pupils can send a cup to someone special to give them a compliment. You could also use the cup without the poem for pupils to write their own little poem or message. Just delete the text if want to do that. You could also use it to put on the front of a Christmas card. They could also collect compliments using a plain heart. You could make a different message. This would work well for a group circle time activity.
All the text is editable in PowerPoint. Great for our Welsh ELSAs to translate if they want to.
To edit just click on the text and type. This font has been embedded in the file.
Once you have edited the resource, save it and then save it again as a PDF file. You can now print your cups.
There are 7 different Christmas mindful backgrounds and 1 cup that is blank so pupils could decorate themselves. This one could mean that you could use this at any time of the year, not just Christmas. Pupils will enjoy the mindfulness of colouring their cups.
You will receive a PDF file if you just want to use it as it is and a PowerPoint file if you want to change the text.
The poem is my poem and copyright to me so please do not alter or change this in anyway. You can obviously write your own poem or message if you want to edit it.
Benefits of this activity:
Mindfulness and being absorbed in the present moment
Thinking of others
Giving to others
Thinking of nice things to say to others
This is an ELSA Secondary Anger pack of worksheets to help you support pupils who have anger issues. These are all in black and white for easy and cost effective printing. This is suitable for upper KS2, secondary pupils and adults.
We also have another useful worksheet pack for secondary pupils
Included in the elsa secondary anger pack
Anger firework activity (11 sheets) This will help explain what happens when an anger episode is triggered
The fight or flight response information
Body response to anger information
Useful coping strategies information
Thoughts information
Self talk information
Anger iceberg information and worksheet
Anger triggers weekly diary
Anger triggers daily diary
Weekly thought diary for reframing thoughts
Daily thought diary for reframing thoughts
CBT cycle info
CBT cycle worksheet
Challenging negative thinking worksheet
Reflection time
Anger synonyms
You could put these into a pack for your pupils and make workbooks according to their needs.
26 sheets in the pack
This is a HUGE ELSA Secondary worksheet bundle with 68 worksheets that will be helpful for secondary pupils. It will also be good for upper KS2 or for those more mature pupils. It will also be helpful for adults too.
All the worksheets are black and white for easy and cost effective printing. There is minimal clipart.
Areas covered are:
Self-esteem
Emotions
Wellbeing
Anxiety
They can be used individually with pupils, with groups of pupils and whole classes of pupils. Build your lesson around a worksheet.
You could make up a workbook for each child you are working with to help with their specific problems by carefully choosing worksheets that would help them.
This is an anger scale poster or visual for display or for showing pupils who struggle with anger. It could also be put up in classrooms or work areas.
This is a set of Scared Synonym Posters which are differentiated according to age. These all print as A3 posters.
There is one for early years, kS1 and KS2 upwards.
It is so helpful for pupils to learn vocabulary around feeling words. Being able say exactly how you feel with accuracy (Emotional granularity) can really help reduce the emotion felt.
This one is about being scared.
These would be great in your area, and a brilliant way for you to try and encourage your pupil to be more specific when they say ‘I feel scared’ You can help them to explore other words by using these posters.
This is a Halloween Pumpkin Scary expressions worksheet to use.
This is fab for teaching about the emotion of fear. What sort of expressions do you make when you are scared about something? Ask the pupil to draw as many as they can on the pumpkins. Black and white worksheet included too!
This is a Halloween Pumpkin Scary words worksheet to use on the run up to Halloween. It is a great way to teach pupils about the synonyms for fear. There are so many words they can use and examples are given.
They can fill the pumpkin with words. They could use lots of colours perhaps in pumpkin colours to write the words to make it more interesting. Take every opportunity to discuss each word, what it means and when they might have felt like that.