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Edinburgh International Book Festival 2024
This summer, the Resilience Rucksack team were invited to run a stall during the School Gala days at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, which included the gala day exclusive to primary schools on Thursday 22 August and the brand-new Teen Takeover – exclusive to secondary schools on Wednesday 21 August. We ran two creative activities, a Friendship Tree and Self-Compassion Library.
The Friendship Tree
We encouraged pupils to take a leaf and write a supportive, positive message of friendship. This is aimed at pupils moving from primary to secondary school. Then pupils could hang their leaf on the friendship tree and are free to read everyone else’s. This received a very positive response, in particular from pupils who had already moved to secondary school and wanted to share their messages of support from a position of experience.
The Self-Compassion Library
We invited pupils to think about whether they have read any books that they think show kindness, where characters are kind to themselves and others. For example, this can be when characters are faced with a challenge but are kind to themselves when facing this or when they make decisions which show compassion towards themselves. Then, pupils used blank templates to draw these characters or design a new front cover for this book. We also encouraged pupils to make up their own stories and write a blurb for their books.
These were then displayed in our Self-Compassion Library.
Click here to find out more about the Edinburgh International Book Festival.