Why we love to Discover Your Strengths
This activity is about noticing and celebrating your child’s strengths. This a wonderful way to boost their self-esteem, resilience, happiness and confidence.
Discovering and noticing strengths
If your child is 10 years or older, they can discover their strengths scientifically using the VIA Strengths finder quiz on the All Right? website. But, see below for our guide for doing this first.
If your child is younger than 10, the best way to do this activity is to use our strengths cards which you can either print or recreate, and chat with your child about which top five strengths you see them as having, and why.
Believe us - kids love this! And sometimes they’ll reverse this and do the same for you!
Getting the tech side of things all set up is really easy and the below steps will allow you to create a unique link for your tamariki to use, and so you can access their results.
- Head here and fill in your details.
- Click SET UP A VIA PRO SITE
- Follow the steps to create your unique survey:
– Under Surveys ensure you select the youth option (disregard the note re: those under 13, as this shouldn't prove an issue).
When you hit save you'll be taken to a page with your unique link to share, e.g: http://smithfamily.pro.viasurvey.org - share this with your children in order that they can complete the youth survey.
We also recommend you take the survey yourself. If nothing else it’ll make you feel good and boost your familiarity with the quiz, mean you can kōrero around your similarities and differences and it will also make you feel good!
Once you have both/all completed the surveys, you might print them off or use our strengths cards (print or recreate) with your top 24 strengths. Encourage your child to check out the information about their strengths (rather than focussing on just the ‘names’) as, some of the names seem ‘strange’ but their meaning gives lots more context and can really help us understand what our top strengths are.
Let your child know that while they have top strengths, they actually have all 24 strengths – some are just stronger than others. Just because a strength is number 24 on the list, doesn’t mean you don’t possess it, and we can all grow and develop strengths.
It’s also handy to know that behind the scenes, you might have two or three strengths come out with the same top score! It’s better to focus on your top five, aka your ‘signature’ strengths then to get too hung up on what comes in at number one.
Ways we can use our strengths everyday:
- Ask your child to describe times in their day – quiet times, fun times, challenging times, worrying times — and let them know the strengths you think they used, to help in each situation.
- Discuss times when we can ‘tap into’ specific strengths and use our strengths to reach goals, form strong friendships and face issues that come our way.
- Discuss whether they knew these were their top or ‘signature’ strengths and how do they feel about them?
- Look at old photos for examples of when they've used different strengths and you may be able to see these in action!
- Ask whether they have any goals and together discuss which of their strengths could use to help reach these.
- Are there any strengths they’d like to work on or develop? What are one or two ways they could do this? We can grow our strengths - it just takes practice, so over time our top 5 strengths can change.
What next
We find tamariki are usually pretty chuffed with their results. If they’re looking for more information and how to use their strengths, guide them here.
For another Sparklers activity that can be adapted for home use, check out: Use Your Strengths
