Tip of the Week

Tip of the Week

This is a collection of the best ideas for your mentoring sessions collected over the years that Chance UK has provided mentoring to children with behavioural difficulties.

The tips range from practical to session ideas, ways of behaving and new ways to keep the mentoring fresh and exciting.

If your mentee is struggling with a particular skill, think of as many creative ways of practising the skill as you can.

For example, if your mentee is struggling with learning to tell the time, ask them how long your session will be if it starts at 2pm and ends at 5pm; if swimming, work out together when you will leave the pool using the swimming pool clock; and use bus timetables to calculate the time between buses.

Consider what your child would benefit from improving, and think of everyday ways to help them with this.

Consider doing a joint session with another mentor and child that you know.

This will allow you to see how your child interacts with other children and allow you to encourage sharing and other positive behaviour.

If you do want to arrange a joint session, always do this via your Programme Manager. They may know things about the other child that you don’t, and can suggest ideas to help the session run more smoothly. 

Create an achievement card.

This has spaces for six achievements, such as not swearing during the session or always saying please and thank you in shops. Whenever the child achieves something (however small), let them put a sticker in one of the spaces on the card. Whenever they complete all the achievements on the card, they can bank it, and be rewarded with one of a selection of special sessions.

The achievements could be pre-determined with your programme manager, according to what you would like to see the child doing more of, or you can add stickers any time your child does something well. 

Children can be good at finding exceptions as well. They will always remember the one time you allowed them to buy chips on a session, so be consistent in your setting of ground rules.

Buy a photo calendar for photos of your child on mentoring sessions throughout the year to act as a visual scrapbook. You can buy one from Boots or similar shops; they're like mini-slip charts and have plastic pockets for the photo to go in.

Establish behaviour guidelines as early as possible. These can be written in a creative way, as if they were a football player's contract or as Three Golden Rules for the child to remember and be reminded of.

Always carry healthy food in your mentoring bag. This way whenever your child is hungry, you can always have some smoothies, fruit or other healthy food on hand to give them.

If you want to do a scrapbook of your mentoring year, begin it early if possible. Keep photos, tickets and anything else you can think of to add to it.

Encourage the child to be creative in drawing and writing in the scrapbook, and give the book to them to keep at the end of the year.

As well as finding exceptions to your child's bad behaviour, it's important to remember them as well.

If you can remember lots of examples of when your child has behaved well, it will be easier to help them remember and have even more of these times.

If you’re going on a big trip together, consider the journey to and from the event – what will you do together on the bus journey? This is potentially the best part of the session, so prepare some games, activities and conversation topics for the child.

You can never plan your mentoring sessions too much.

Giving some thought in advance to where you will go, what you might talk about and what you'd like to achieve helps you get more out of the sessions. What's more, any ideas you don’t use can be used at the next session.

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