Category Archives: Cultural Capital

Creativity, Cultural Capital, Learning, Personal Development, Taskmaster, Taskmaster in School, Teaching, Teaching and Learning, Teamwork

What’s So Good About Taskmaster Club? SELF-ESTEEM

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Week 6 — Self-Esteem: Feeling Capable, Connected and Valued

Self-esteem – a young person’s sense of their own worth, capability and belonging – is foundational to wellbeing, motivation and engagement in learning. It helps pupils take on challenges, cope with setbacks, and grow with confidence. Importantly, feeling connected and valued in school supports pupils’ confidence and sense of worth, which in turn enhances learning, attendance and social engagement.

Taskmaster Club nurtures self-esteem in multiple, interconnected ways. It gives everyone the chance to succeed, values a wide range of skills, and builds a strong sense of community and purpose. Pupils feel recognised, included and capable, which matters deeply for how they see themselves both in school and beyond.

What Is Self-Esteem — and Why It Matters

Self-esteem can be thought of as the internal sense that “I can do things that matter” and “I belong here”. In education, strong self-esteem supports:

  • confidence in tackling new, unfamiliar tasks
  • resilience when facing setbacks
  • willingness to participate socially and academically
  • a positive sense of identity within a community

When pupils feel competent and valued, they are more likely to engage willingly with peers, try new strategies, and persevere through uncertainty – all essential for deep learning.

How Taskmaster Club Supports Self-Esteem

Taskmaster Club builds self-esteem because it naturally creates conditions known to support confidence, belonging and valued participation.

1. Multiple Routes to Success

The diversity of the tasks means there isn’t just one way to succeed. Some tasks reward creativity, others logic, others communication or performance. This broad terrain allows many pupils to experience mastery, which research links directly to greater self-worth.

Because everyone’s strengths can shine at different moments, pupils learn that their contributions matter.

2. Shared Achievement Builds Confidence

Unlike in the show, most Club tasks are collaborative. Pupils celebrate together – they laugh, they problem-solve, and they succeed as a team. Research on collaborative school activities shows that positive peer acknowledgement and shared success help pupils feel accepted and competent, reinforcing their self-esteem.

3. Positive Community & Belonging

Feeling “part of something” is vital. Studies show that pupils who feel connected to their peers and to school communities are happier, more confident and more resilient learners. Feeling valued by others — not just standing alone — boosts how pupils see themselves.

Taskmaster Club fosters exactly that kind of connection: team camaraderie, shared goals, mutual encouragement, and inclusive engagement.

4. Encouragement to Try, Fail and Improve

Self-esteem isn’t just about success – it’s also about learning to cope with failure. In Taskmaster Club, failure is temporary, social and often funny rather than punitive. Pupils learn that trying something outside their comfort zone is worth doing even if it doesn’t work first time.

This builds resilience – a core psychological ingredient of robust self-esteem.

5. Everyone is Seen and Heard

Whether a pupil contributes an idea, a practical skill, a creative suggestion, or a supportive comment, their voice matters. Feeling listened to and acknowledged by peers is strongly linked with a sense of acceptance and worth among young people.

Why This Matters in School and Life

Strong self-esteem helps pupils:

  • take on academic challenges with confidence
  • build positive relationships with peers
  • engage more deeply in school life
  • cope with transitions and setbacks
  • pursue personal goals with agency

In a time when many young people report low levels of belonging and decreasing life satisfaction, creating spaces where pupils feel valued and connected is more important than ever.

Practical Ways to Strengthen Self-Esteem Through Taskmaster Club

If you’re running a Taskmaster Club, here are ways to make self-esteem support more intentional:

  1. Celebrate Diverse Successes
    Highlight and value different kinds of contributions – creative, logical, collaborative, supportive – not just the “winning” outcome.
  2. Encourage Reflection on Strengths
    Ask pupils what they did well, what they tried that was bold, and what they learned about themselves.
  3. Rotate Roles and Responsibilities
    Give everyone a chance to lead, present, support and encourage – helping each pupil experience valued participation.
  4. Affirm Effort Over Perfection
    Reward perseverance, clever ideas, and collaborative effort, even when the task result isn’t perfect.

Final Thought

Self-esteem is not a static trait — it is a living outcome of positive experiences, meaningful connections and repeated opportunities to feel capable. Taskmaster Club delivers exactly that: a playful space where pupils succeed, learn from mistakes, feel accepted, are encouraged to contribute, and build confidence both in themselves and with others.

In doing so, Taskmaster Club helps young people develop not just skills — but a stronger sense of who they are, what they can do, and where they belong.

Children’s Mental Health Week

In 2023 we partnered with Place2Be for Children’s Mental Health Week and created some tasks to support the campaign. This YouTube playlist includes the tasks and a few other gems.

Taskmaster Club materials:

Further posts in the ‘What’s So Good About Taskmaster Club series:

Cultural Capital, Games

Great games for kids and adults to learn together

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This blog is a guide to some of the best games to play with adults and children. They encourage strategic thinking and are mostly small, lightweight games that are perfect for taking on holiday. They are also the sorts of games that have simple rules and don’t take long to play. These appeal to me because I have the attention span of a gnat.

Games include:

  1. OK Play
  2. Kluster
  3. Genius Square
  4. Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza
  5. Herd Mentality
  6. Sussed?
  7. The Sock Game
  8. P For Pizza
  9. Boggle
  10. Top Trumps
  11. Pass the Pigs

OK Play

OK Play is the perfect travel game for up to four players. It even comes with a carabiner to clip onto you backpack, belt or coat. It might be lightweight but it’s also an excellent strategic challenge for all ages. I’ve played this with my children and groups of adults and everyone finds it engaging.

It’s basically Connect 5, only, without the frame. Each player gets a set of coloured squares and attempt to make a row of 5 connected vertically, horizontally or diagonally. As you all get better at the game, eventually you’ll run out of square. Fear not, the game isn’t over. You can then pick up and move other squares. In theory the game could go on forever, but it never does. I’m usually busy trying to stop someone while someone else quietly wins on the diagonal.

OK Play is great for anywhere between 5 minutes or an hour.

Learn how to play OK Play here.

Kluster

This game requires strategy and a steady hand. Take turns to place the magnetic pebbles inside the orange rope. If any pebble touch each other (or Kluster) on your turn, you must pick them up. The first person to get rid of all of their pebbles wins.

We found that, if you’re really careful, you can get all of the pebbles inside the ring of rope without causing a Kluster. This led to us tying a knot in the rope to make it a little smaller and add a bit more jeopardy.

This game is fun, quick and people of all ages are able to play, although it says 14+ on the box. I’m not really sure why. Unless the magnet are so powerful, they mess with the minds of the younger and more impressionable players. Or maybe they are worried that children aged 13 or younger might try to eat the pebbles. Either way, be warned.

Learn how to play Kluster here.

Genius Square

I adore Genius Square. I don’t think you necessarily need to be a genius to play it, but it was certainly created by a genius. With over 62,000 possible puzzles to solve, each with a least one solution, you’ll never get bored of this game.

It comes in a decent sized box, which makes it the least travel-friendly games on this list, but you could pop the pieces into bag to make it more compact.

Genius Square comes with two grid boards, 9 coloured different-shaped blocks and 7 ‘blocker’ pieces for each player, as well as 7 co-ordinates dice. Roll the co-ordinates dice, place the ‘blockers’ on the corresponding squares on your grid and then race your opponent to fill in the rest of the grid with the coloured shapes.

Learn how to play the Genius Square here.

TACO CAT GOAT CHEESE PIZZA

Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza is silly, funny and very intense. It’s sort of like Snap! for the 21st century. Each player has a pile of cards and takes turns to turn them over and place them on the pile in the middle. While placing the card down they must say the items from the name of the name in that order. So the first players says ‘Taco’, the second player says ‘Cat’ and so on. If the picture on the card matches the word being said, then everyone has to put their hand on the centre pile, last hand on the pile picks up all of the cards and adds them to their stack. The winner is the first to get rid of all of their cards.

That, in itself, would be fun and intense. However, there is another twist. There are also 3 other cards. The narwhal, gorilla and groundhog. If the groundhog card appears, you all need to bang the table and put your hand in the middle. If you get the gorilla, you all beat your chests before putting your hands in. Finally, if you get the narwhal, you clap above your heads before putting your hands in.

Learn how to play here.

Herd Mentality

This game is simple, silly and a whole lot of fun. The aim of the game is to not stand out from the crowd. The question wrangler reads out a question and you have to pick the answer that most other people will say. The players who choose the most common answer all get one cow token – first to 8 tokens wins. If you are the only player who gets a uniquely unpopular answer, you have the pink cow. You cannot win while you have the pink cow.

This game can lead to interesting and enlightening conversations with your friends and family. But more importantly, we laughed a lot while playing.

Learn how to play Herd Mentality here.

Sussed?

Another great game for getting the conversation started is Sussed. Sussed is an effective way to getting talking, laughing and sharing with your friends and family. Each player gets A, B and C cards and places them down to guess what the person asking the question would answer. I’m sure there could be a way of winning and losing and scoring points with this game, but we just enjoy having a few goes each and finding out about each other.

Learn how to play Sussed? here.

The Sock Game

The Sock Game has been a firm family favourite in our house for the past few years. Each team gets a sock filled with stuff and the players take it in turns to put a hand in the sock to try and retrieve the named item, without looking.

It’s great fun but can get rather intense. Also, look out for everyone’s sock-face. We’ve all got them. It’s the face we pull when our hands are furiously sifting through ping-pong ball and marbles to find a small spring.

The Sock Game came about when a couple of brothers crowd funded a game that their family had played for years. Find out more here.

Learn to play the Sock Game here.

Sounds Fishy

Sounds Fishy is a great game of bluff and double bluff. One player reads a question, but does not know the answer. The other players can see the answer, but only one of them reads it. The others all need to make an answer up. If their answer is picked by the questioner, they get a point. The questioner is looking for little clues in the reactions of the other players and the more you all play it, the harder it gets to spot the truth.

Learn how to play Sounds Fishy here.

P For Pizza

This is a really simply one, but it does get you thinking. You get a letter and a category and you simply have to think of something in the category that begins with that letter. As in, name a food that begins with a P and then you get P is for Pizza.

The winner of each hand gets a triangle and once you’ve got 9 triangles and made them into a pizza slice, you’ve won the game.

We found this very quick to play and my youngest did get a little disheartened initially when she wasn’t able to get an answer quickly enough. This led to us adapting how to play the game slightly, but it was still loads of fun.

Learn how to play P For Pizza here.

Boggle

Boggle is an oldie but a goodie. I used to play this with my grandparents many years ago and play I it my own children now. You shake up the box of 16 lettered cubes, flip the egg timer and write down as many words as you can before the timer runs out. Words can be 3 or more letters long and can be made up of letters that connect horizontally, vertically or diagonally.

If I’m entirely honest, I wasn’t overly keen on Boggle as a child because I wasn’t the most confident speller. This may have been because I was the youngest child playing against older siblings and adults. You can tweak the rules for younger players if you like. You might allow them to submit two letter words or accept phonetically plausible attempts to encourage them. The more time spent playing word games and discussing spellings the better with when helping children learn to spell.

Learn how to play Boggle here.

Top Trumps

By this points its clear that you can get a set of Top Trumps for pretty much any interest you might have. If you chosen niche is catered for, you can always download a template and make your own. Like this one from TES.

Top Trumps are great for younger children to help them develop a their basic number and place value knowledge. Beyond that, they are fantastic to use as a teaching and learning device for any given subject whether history, geography, science or sports related.

Learn how to play Top Trumps here.

Pass The Pigs

This one is fun and silly but can be brutally harsh as you can be winning for the whole game, only to lose it all on your final go. I play Pass the Pigs at school as well as with my children at home and I’ve written about it before here.

Learn how to play Pass the Pigs here.

Cultural Assemblies, Cultural Capital

Cultural Assemblies

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As part of our commitment to increase the cultural capital we offer to the children at our school we hold weekly cultural assemblies. These assemblies follow the same format where I share interesting and inspiring people from all walks of life and we also look at significant events from history that happened in that week.

As the children come in they listen to music by the Musician of the Week. Different songs from the artist are played at the beginning and end of assemblies during the week.

Assembly-Music-Profiles-1Download

We also look at art work from a great range of Artist from all over the world. The work is from a mixture of modern and classic artists. It’s great for starting discussions about art and the slides we use come from c_liddiard on tes. We’ve made a couple of tweaks, but it’s basically these slides.

With the weekly Sports Legend we look at sporting personalities from a range of different sports. Some are extremely well known, others are less familiar but interesting nonetheless and all are greats in their chosen sports.

39-Sports-LegendsDownload

We also share stories of Awesome Children using some brilliant slides that I saw on Twitter. Unfortunately I can’t find the source at the moment, but I’ll add a link when I do. The common thread with all of these children is that, although they are young they were able to make a difference in their communities and the wider world. This is a great message for our children to hear every week.

Finally, we share key events from history that happened during any given week. I use two websites to find out the information. This one and this one.

The assemblies themselves are a whistle stop tour of all of the above, but different classes do a more in-depth look at the different areas over the week so the children get a better understanding of the inspiring people and historical events.

In addition to our Cultural Assemblies, we also develop our children’s cultural capital through The Sidlesham 101. It’s a list of 101 things a child should experience before they leave primary school put together by children, parents and staff from our school.