My Good School, Sunday 29th June 2025

YES Workshop with Shikha Agnihotri of Right Side Story

Discussion on puberty, growing up, and adolescence with high school students, led by Shikha Agnihotri from Right Side Story.

Key Takeaways

• Puberty involves both physical and emotional changes that are beyond one's control; understanding these changes helps normalise the experience ("puberty is not a race")

• Students shared insights on mood swings, emotional changes, and physical transformations during puberty, demonstrating awareness but also misconceptions

• The session emphasised communication as a crucial strategy for managing challenging emotions and relationships during adolescence

• Gender differences during puberty were discussed, including societal expectations and biological variations, with an emphasis on respect for all genders

Topics

Understanding Puberty and Growth

• Puberty is defined as a "software update" in the mind and body, signalling the transition from childhood.

• Students recognised that puberty is influenced by genetics and occurs at different ages for different people.

• Physical changes discussed included body odour, voice changes such as the Adam's apple in boys, and muscle development.

• Brain "rewiring" during puberty leads to feelings of independence and new emotional experiences.

• Girls and boys experience different physical changes, but both face hormonal shifts (testosterone vs. estrogen)

Emotional Changes During Puberty

• Students identified negative emotions experienced: anxiety, jealousy, frustration, irritation, depression.

• Positive emotions noted: happiness from recognition, validation, success, and achievement.

• Discussion of mood swings affecting both genders, not just girls, as commonly believed

• Students expressed challenges with controlling emotions during puberty

• Shikha emphasised that emotions during puberty are often temporary but intense, requiring patience

Friendship and Relationships During Adolescence

• Students debated whether friendship affects puberty or puberty affects friendship

• Trust issues in friendships were highlighted as a challenge during puberty

• Advice given: when hurt by friends, communicate within 24 hours rather than avoiding the issue

• Self-inflicted independence during puberty can strain relationships with parents and authority figures

• Importance of finding trusted adults to discuss difficult decisions emphasised

Self-Image and Body Awareness

• Students noted increased focus on appearance during puberty (clothes, hygiene, physical features)

• Discussion about boys becoming more conscious about their physical appearance (muscles, height)

• Girls discussed increased attention to skincare, makeup, and fashion choices

• The importance of hygiene is emphasised, especially regarding body odour, which increases during puberty

• Both genders experience increased self-consciousness and concern about how others perceive them

Reading Session: Animal Behaviour and Taste with Brinda Ghosh

• The second half of the meeting featured a reading from "The Inner Life of Animals" focusing on taste in animals

• Discussed how animals have different taste preferences than humans (example: crows eating seeds from horse excrement)

• Explored how taste is adapted to different species' needs and evolutionary history

• Reading skills were emphasised, including proper use of punctuation and expression while reading

• Importance of regular reading beyond textbooks (15-20 minutes daily) was encouraged

Next Steps

• Shikha proposed separate follow-up sessions for boys and girls to discuss puberty more openly

• Future session on pronunciation and reading skills to be conducted by Brinda

• After completing the current book, the group will read Gerald Durrell's works about animals

• Students are encouraged to practice communication skills when dealing with emotional challenges

• Students advised to develop reading habits beyond textbooks (15-20 minutes daily)

The relationship between exercise and mental health - Shambhavi Nautiyal

If you feel overwhelmed or want to stay in shape, it is a great idea to exercise. Exercise helps you feel happy and productive. 

According to the Bhagavad Gita, it is a rajasic activity, i.e., an activity that makes you feel vigorous and fervent, and a way to worship God since you are sacrificing your comfort to do something productive. It is consequential to maintain both your physical and mental health. If you are someone who experiences low self-worth or insecurity about. If you are not productive enough when giving yourself a self-care day, then this is a sign for you to exercise. 

Exercising helps regulate your breathing and hence grounds you at the moment (i.e.increasing your mindfulness) whilst releasing the "feel-good" hormones of serotonin and endorphins. It regulates your thyroid, makes your heart stronger, improves your memory, and concentration, and keeps diabetes at bay for you. Knowing all these benefits will certainly leave you feeling less stressed out as you meditate on how you are blessed with such good health.

Investing in 30 minutes of exercise every day. Exercise is implicitly fruitful for people with mental conditions like anxiety, depression, and schizophrenia, as it helps ease the symptoms and also leaves the average person feeling easier than usual. If you are healing from depression, then it can give you something, like a purpose to focus on, and help distract you from negative thinking. patterns. It can also provide you with a community if you go out and join yoga classes or a gym. This can aid in removing feelings of isolation and loneliness. You move through the day feeling like you are at the helm of your decisions and have gifted your body something in return for all that it does for you. Your body feels agile, robust, and healthy. So appreciate your body be body-positive, and keep exercising!

Shambhavi Nautiyal 9F

Ahlcon Public School

Image courtesy- Canva

Strength - Nishan Karki

“You really have to look inside yourself and find your own inner strength, and say, ‘I’m proud of what I am and who I am".  ―Mariah Carey

We don't even know how strong we are until we are forced to bring that hidden strength forward. Strength means not mere physical strength. Weightlifting, carrying bulky things, etc. does not depict our real strength. Strength means more.

Strength also includes our inner strength or our hidden strength. Inner strength means our willpower, courage, confidence, endurance, mental power, and some values present in us. A person with inner strength can do his work more efficiently than a person with physical strength. He analyses, plans and prepares his ideas before doing athe ny work. He does this so as to get best possible outcome.

We need inner strength in th following cases:

● Dealing with our problems, difficulties and failures in life.
● Dealing with stressed people so as to make them comfortable, happy and joyous.

● To develop important and essential values such as humanity, patience, kindness, honesty, trust, etc.
● To take decisions efficiently and following them.

Many people lack in inner strength. They fail to bring out their hidden inner strength forward. As a result, they cannot develop essential values in themselves. They have to suffer many difficulties in life. Hence, inner strength is as much important as physical strength. In fact, it is more important than physical strength. We should learn to develop inner strength and to bring it forward.

Name- Nishan Karki

Class-10, Pestalozzi Children's Village India

There are many dimensions to every person - Kiran Vehniwal

Picture Courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Dimension

'There are many dimensions to every person'.

The statement in itself holds different meanings and perspectives. To some, it may be in physical dimensions and to some in the context of psychological aspects. 

Every individual has their own experiences. Some come from his inner self, and some from the outer world. Sometimes it matters the most to one person, but it may not to another. That does not make one right and the other wrong. It's just their insight to see things. 

The mind plays the most role in demonstrating different dimensions of a person. It has its logic and reasons to interpret a situation. Some see life as full of choices and risks to take and live it to the fullest. 

For some, life is just an assigned challenge they take and pass on to make it to the other end. They fail to enjoy and cherish little moments in their journey when they get too busy making a life than living life.

And sometimes, the outer world changes the inner self. That's where the two dimensions collide, and the individual moves to a different personality dimension. 

The question that arises is how to understand an individual's needs to make them comfortable with him when a person has different extents and at some point fails to interpret what he wants.

Kiran Vehniwal

Prita Lee Lesson School

"PEOPLE are more important than THINGS" - Nishan Karki

https://goodschoolsalliance.godaddysites.com/my-good-school

"Most of the important things in the world have been

accomplished by people who have kept on trying 

when there seemed to be no hope at all."

~Dale Carnegie

People and things are very different from each other. People are social beings who can communicate, interact, work, play, and share their thoughts, ideas, emotions and opinions, like other things. Things cannot do all the activities mentioned above. People possess many important values which make them more

important than things. Things are just objects which have a physical presence. Things include utensils, stationery, chair, table, electronics, etc. People only gave the ideas to invent these things. It shows that things exist because of the people who invented them. Therefore people are more important than things.

There are many reasons why people are more important than things. Some of them are listed below:

● People can take care and look out for each other, but things do not. We were not born, nourished and raised by things. It was our parents who did things. Parents are the people who were our first and foremost teachers who taught us to walk, eat, speak, play and help us to know about things.

● People can give us happiness and satisfaction more than things. There are only a few people who get satisfaction and happiness from things. But for most of us, we get satisfaction and happiness from people. People only provide support and help when we face problems in our life. They are the ones who encourage us to follow the right path to get success.

● Parents, friends, teachers, relatives and siblings are the people who make our life meaningful, not things.

● Even the value of gold, silver, diamond, etc., is less compared to people. We will get money by selling these minerals, but we will not get the support, help, encouragement and guidance that people can provide us.

Life would of no meaning if people were not present around us. Without other people in our life, we will have a limited viewpoint to look at the world.

Therefore, PEOPLE are more important than THINGS.

Written by-

Nishan Karki

Pestalozzi Children's Village, India

International Yoga Day - Ritu Parihar

International Yoga Day

Today our school celebrated 7th International Yoga Day. Everyone participated with great zeal and enthusiasm. The session was conducted by Rahul Sir and Abhay Sir. It was started with our Principal Ma'am's message to practice yoga in our daily lives. Then, we performed several asanas virtually, and the benefits were explained. 

Yoga is the only process in which you can exercise without any equipment. The light that yoga sheds on life are something special. Yoga is a group of physical, mental, and spiritual practices or disciplines originating in ancient India. It is an art and science of healthy living.

There are lots of benefits to practising yoga. It increases your flexibility and helps you to build strength. It improves your posture and helps to keep your joints healthy. 

Yoga is a powerful mindfulness practice. It reduces stress and lowers blood pressure. In addition, yoga's incorporation of meditation and breathing can improve a person's mental well-being. Regular yoga practice creates mental clarity and calmness, increases body awareness, relieves stress, relaxes the mind, centres attention, and sharpens concentration. Therefore, yoga should be part of our daily routine to live a happy and healthy life.

Ritu Parihar

Class  IX A

The Fabindia School