Tooled Up Education

Helping Children Deal with Disappointment if They Aren’t Offered Their First Choice School

When children aren’t offered a place at their first choice school, especially if they’ve worked hard to sit an exam, or gone through an interview process, they can feel disappointed, deflated, and perhaps even rejected. If your child needs some help navigating through some of the discomfort of these emotions, here are our top tips. We’d recommend that you read this advice in advance, so that you can put some pre-emptive steps in place, which will help your child to feel content and hopeful, whatever setting they eventually attend.

Making Sense of Emotions and Learning to Handle Them: Teacher Guidance and Presentation

This teacher guidance accompanies the video resource “Making Sense of Emotions and Learning to Handle Them” and takes you through how to implement this lesson, step by step. The presentation for pupils has been created with 11-13 year olds in mind. It aims to help young people to recognise their emotions, provides helpful advice on developing strategies for handling them and talks about how to be a good friend to others. It’s packed full of practical questions and activities which will get your students thinking!

Making Sense of Emotions and Learning to Handle Them

This presentation for pupils has been created with 11-12 year olds in mind. It aims to help young people to recognise their emotions, provides helpful advice on developing strategies for handling them and talks about how to be a good friend to others. It’s packed full of practical questions and activities which will get your students thinking!

Children’s Books about Loneliness or Isolation

This list of books for children and tweens all feature characters dealing with situations where they feel lonely or isolated and who deal with their emotions by going on adventures, finding new friends and expressing themselves in a variety of ingenious ways. If your child is lonely, or you think that they might be, these stories can help to kickstart conversations about how they are feeling and things they can do to help. They may also help them to understand that feeling lonely sometimes is very common and that they aren’t alone.

Managing Your Gremlin

It’s really important to be kind to other people, but it’s just as important to be kind to ourselves. Sometimes, we might think bad or negative things about ourselves. These kinds of thoughts tend to make us feel worse! It’s important to notice when we think like this and stand up to these unhelpful little ‘gremlin thoughts’. This activity can help!

My Coping Menu

When we feel strong emotions, such as sadness, anger, fear or anxiety, it’s useful to have a toolkit of things we can do that we know will help to make us feel better. Encourage children to choose from our suggested menu of options (or come up with their own) to create a list of go-to people and activities that they know will help when they feel overwhelmed, down in the dumps or cross. Keep it to hand, so that they can access it as soon as these feelings arise.

Describing Anger

Anger is a normal and important feeling to be able to describe. The words and phrases in this resource can be used to expand children’s vocabulary around anger, explore this emotion and develop strategies to manage it.