Sompting Abbotts' headmaster uses 150-year-old tree to help children with 'lockdown resilience'
Mr Stuart Douch, Head of Sompting Abbotts Prep School, has made a video lesson about resilience for children that has been widely shared by parents on social media.
"We are very mindful of the stresses of lockdown confinement," he said. “The challenges of balancing home life and school work are tough for both children and their parents,” said Mr Douch.
Tree of Strength
Mr Douch’s lesson, presented in a virtual assembly, was based on the poem Tree of Strength. The poem is filmed against the video backdrop of a great sycamore tree in the school’s grounds.
The vast tree is thought to be over 150 years old. It stands at over 80 feet high and has a trunk girth of more than four feet. It would have been planted in the 1870s when the school building was a stately home known as Sompting Manor.
The poem is by child mental health expert and poet Dr Pooky Knightsmith.
Mr Douch is himself shielding and unable to be with the children at school. So he filmed his part of the lesson in the churchyard of his own local church, St James the Less, in Lancing.
Resilience is not a ‘magic super power’
In it, he tells the children that resilience is not a ‘magic super power’. It is all about being positive right now and accepting that you can’t change everything.
“I know that many of you are missing your school friends and feeling lonely at home,” he said. “Some of you may be finding getting on with a sister or brother at home difficult.”
He urges all children to give someone in their family a hug each day and to tell them that they love them. “That will make the difference between a day being a difficult day and a much better day,” he says.
Sompting Abbotts has remained open to children of its key worker parents.
Staff suspended classes for one minute's silence on Tuesday April 28 at 11am in recognition of the critical work that NHS staff are doing.