A special start to a Zippy’s Friends session
Charlotte Loveday in is a HLTA in Lincolnshire. She’s found lots of ways to make her Zippy’s Friends sessions a special part of the school day.
“Each session starts with giving out the Zippy’s Friends medals. A different child each week is chosen to give out the cardboard medals that children wear for the session. Then we start with our feelings tree. This is something I made for module one but we use it every session now. I choose names out of a bag and the chosen children talk about how they are feeling that day and display their feelings on the tree (of course they don’t have to say anything if they don’t want to!). After that we practise the rules and sing our Zippy song.
We have shorter Zippy’s Friends sessions as I deliver them in the class teacher’s PPA time. So normally we do the story and the first activity in one session and the second activity from the session plan the next week. This means we deliver the programme over two years. It works really well as by the time we get to trickier topics like bullying and loss in module 4 and 5 the children are a bit older. It also means we have time to use activities from the inclusion supplement which really help reinforce the programme.
Personally, I love the programme, the layouts and the lesson plans are really clear and the children love the characters.”