Improving Your Gratitude!

- Taonga, My Gratitude Box

What kind of impact can gratitude affect on your life? In Health I have learnt that gratitude can mean a lot of things or can help you in lots of different ways as a person in life. I have also learnt that you have to practice gratitude and to practice gratitude you can do these three things, exercise, emote and extend.

My way of Exercising gratitude is, spending 10 minutes before I go to bed and write at least one thing I am grateful for on a piece of paper and put it in my Gratitude box. I will spend at least 5 minutes thinking about one meaningful thing that I am really grateful for to have in my life. It can be an environment, a person or even an object it just has to be something you are truly grateful for and why.

Emote, this means you need to feel what you are grateful for. When I want to feel what I am grateful for I like to make sure I am in a quiet place like my room away from any distractions like electronics and people. I like to take this time to wind down my brain from being on my phone to think about what I am grateful for before I go to bed. Sitting in a quiet place away from any distractions can help you think about how you feel about what you are grateful for.

The last thing you can do to practice gratitude is extend. If I was to write that I am grateful for my parents in order to extend I would do something that shows how I am grateful for them. For example I will clean the house for my Mum and Dad before they get home and because when my dad gets home from work he is always cleaning and I know my Mum likes the house nice and clean. I think this will show how appreciative I am because of my parents' hard work that they do. So doing something positive for someone you are grateful for can show how appreciative you are of them. If you are grateful for a park down the road from where you live, maybe you would like to pick up any rubbish in the area that you're grateful to have.

What are some benefits of gratitude on well-being? Gratitude can improve your social well-being because it helps you understand how lucky you are to have the people, people and objects that are important to you in your life. So you would always want to give them the utmost respect and love towards them because some things might not be possible without them. Gratitude also improves things like physical health, psychological health, self-esteem and can increase mental strength. Gratitude can also open the door to more relationships and some people benefit from better sleep, but overall gratitude can really improve your well-being.

Social Studies

Kia Ora, My name is Paikea Cecil. I am one of the thirty fortunate students who got selected to be part of a class called Akomanga Kaihanga. Our main Social Studies teacher is Ms Apelu. Karl is our main project teacher. The purpose of being part of this class is so we can come up with our own ideas that could help or predict something in our  community for a better future. 

At the start of the term each of us got put into five teams of six. I am in a team called Island Skittles. The other four teams are Team Renegade, Team Polys, Team Donk Corn and Team Jaxxz. The people in my team are Mary, Mathew, Leanah, David, Cherryanne and Me. 

My team's main idea or focus is Water Safety. Our point is that we want more kids to be aware of things like rips or rough rivers. We think that a lot of kids, especially polynesian kids like to hang out at places like the beach or the pools. But sometimes when they're at the beach they could be in a situation where they are swimming and a rip takes one of them out. So we want to provide lessons to teach children how to survive in water when they are alone.

At our school we found out that one of the P.E teachers, Mr Moyes, has a water safety programme for Year 10’s. Me and Mary got to talk to him and he said that this programme is mainly about survival, it's not about knowing how to swim like freestyle or backstroke. The reason why we wanted to talk to Mr Moyes was so that we could ask him if it was possible if this water safety programme can get extended to Year 9’s as well. He said that he will talk to his team about what our group is wanting to try and make happen. But extending Mr Moyes water safety programme was one of our main ideas so that more kids could be involved.

We thought of another idea we didn’t think would work but possibly could. This idea would have to take a lot of time and evidence. We were thinking that Tamaki College should have their own pool. Mr Dunn said that Tamaki College is getting some new buildings and if he can he will put a pool part of the new buildings plan. This idea on building a pool for Tamaki College could take a while to confirm this. Me and my group are gonna have to talk to some people like T.R.C, Mr Dunn and the Head boy and girl.


I think that this project is on the right path and ideas we thought of at the beginning of term 1 are coming to life. Me and my team would love Mr Moyes to get more kids in his programme and to experience it. But if Tamaki College had their own pool Mr Moyes wouldn’t have to worry about booking swimming lanes at our local pool down the road. It could also be easier for more students to be involved in the swimming programme. But the swimming pool idea could take a while to make happen.

Task Description - This was our Social Studies task for homework. I wanted to explain how we started our project and what happened at the start of Term 1. I elaborated on what my team main ideas are and where we are up to at the moment.

Te Whare Tapa Wha - (Health)

In Health we designed and created our own Hauora Box.
On each wall of my Hauora box I wrote the four dimensions representing our well - being.
Each wall has its own dimension - Spiritual, Physical, Mental / Emotional and Social. The maori
words are - Taha Wairua, Taha Tinana, Taha Hinengaro and Taha Whanau. The words listed
under the main words showing what each wall represents are the keywords. The keywords are
words that relate to the dimension that it's in. 

If you look at a house with four walls like this Hauora box. If one of the walls was collapsing
or weak it wouldn't be able to hold the house or the roof for long. But if all four walls are strong
the house would stay up and won't end up collapsing to the ground. If your physical well being
was weak like you aren’t exercising or taking care of your body. That can in someway affect your
other three dimensions. It could affect the way you think or feel. 

Sometimes even one small incident can bring down all four of your walls.
Like you could have an argument with a family member and you have all these negative
emotions and feelings. So then you don’t feel like doing anything like exercise or going for a little walk.
Then you don’t want to talk to anyone like family because of your anger or emotions you are feeling. 

To fix each wall  you can work on one wall at a time or build on it. If you got into an argument with
someone that is family.  You could start with your Social well-being by talking to them about what
had happened and maybe hug it out. Or you could apologise if you think you need to. Once you're
like friends and have sorted out what ever happened you could go to the gym or go for a walk.
Doing fitness can help with things like stress relief or help you to feel better. Things like that
can also help your physical well-being.