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Showing posts from October, 2025

Have a go Spaghettio! Success Helper Goal Setting

Have a go Spaghettio! Success Helper Goal Setting Personal goals give us some direction, something to aim at. In the Have a Go Spaghettio! classroom we can introduce the idea of personal goal setting. There are 6 Success Helper capabilities or competencies that we can develop to help us to experience success, achieving what we set out to achieve. It is important to remind our young class members that positive feelings are linked to achievement, trying new things and making friends with others. A simple definition of success might be: ‘Success is trying to do stuff, doing my best and feeling good about things.’ Success Helper goal setting can be described and encouraged in reference to the Have a Go Spaghettio! Success Helper chart in our daily teaching. A day starter might include a reminder that Success Helper goals help us to get better at stuff. The teacher might set things rolling by declaring that their goal is to practice e.g., the Red Success Helper called ‘I’m worthwhil...

Jonno is not a giraffe!

Teaching children that they cannot be any word used to describe them will help them develop a healthy habit of thinking and believing that is intuitive, automatic. This Success Helper or Brain Friend way of thinking is the goal of the Have a Go Spaghettio! approach to social and emotional wellbeing, called ‘I’m worthwhile crocodile’ thinking. What does this mean? Unconditional self-acceptance  is understanding that there is no law that says our worth is decided by others appraisal of us or how well or badly we do at tasks. We can e.g., act dumb/smart but we cannot be so. It is a Brain Bully belief when we decide that we ‘are’ our dumbness or smartness because it’s not true, there’s no evidence to support this hypothesis! The Have a Go Spaghettio! approach to social and emotional wellbeing teaches young learners about Brain Friend believing which is rational and supported by the evidence. It is as ridiculous to accept that we can be a giraffe as it is to believe we are or can be dum...

Have a Go Spaghettio! Have you been semantically disturbed lately?

A semantic disturbance arises when a person’s constructed virtual representation of reality or mind map doesn’t approximate how things are, the territory, the ‘real’ world. Bear in mind that Einstein and others said that reality itself is a persistent illusion, something concocted based on the organism’s assessment of how they believe things are. A poor assessment, one that doesn’t consider the facts available, is a mis conception or misunderstanding. What we believe or tell ourselves about something is semantically inaccurate and therefore a semantic disturbance exists. This is characterised by feelings of upset to varying degrees, or ‘upsetness’ as Dr Albert Ellis says. Alfred Korzybski ’s General Semantics theory tells us the map is not the territory it represents or the word is not the thing it describes. The ‘self’ under construction in the minds of our young Have a Go Spaghettio! audience can be a helpful, healthy Success Helper type or one that is self-defeating, where Brain ...