Teach Mental Resilience
Build resilience from the inside out
Children are growing up in a world that asks them to manage pressure, change, relationships and uncertainty from an early age. Academic knowledge matters, but it is not enough on its own.
Teach Mental Resilience is Bounce Forward’s progressive primary curriculum, helping children build the psychological skills, language and self-understanding they need to navigate learning, relationships and life with greater confidence.
Rooted in evidence and designed for real classrooms, it gives schools a practical way to make mental resilience part of everyday education from the start.
Lessons
Explore the curriculum
Browse lessons in order, then open any lesson for its summary, learning outcomes, and supporting resources.
Teach Mental Resilience: Resilience & Harnessing Positive Emotions Primary
This foundational lesson introduces students to the concept of mental resilience and explores how positive emotions can be cultivated and used as a resource. Students learn what resilience means, why it matters, and how emotions — particularly positive ones — play a crucial role in building mental strength and wellbeing.
Teach Mental Resilience: Connecting the Brain, Emotions & Thoughts Primary
Students explore the relationship between the brain, emotions, and thinking patterns. This lesson demystifies how the brain processes emotional experiences and how our thoughts are deeply intertwined with how we feel, helping students understand the science behind their emotional responses.
Teach Mental Resilience: Introducing Gremlin Beliefs Primary
This lesson introduces the concept of 'Gremlin Beliefs', the unhelpful, often automatic negative thoughts and beliefs that undermine confidence and resilience. Students learn to identify their own gremlins and understand how these beliefs can hold them back, as a first step towards challenging them.
Teach Mental Resilience: Optimism & Evidence Primary
Building on the gremlin beliefs lesson, this session introduces optimism as a learnable skill. Students discover how to use evidence-based thinking to challenge negative thought patterns and cultivate a more balanced, optimistic outlook, not toxic positivity but realistic and grounded hope.
Teach Mental Resilience: WoBbLe The Big Worries Primary
WoBbLe is a memorable framework that helps students understand that life's ups and downs are normal and manageable. This lesson teaches students to embrace wobbles as part of growth and to use the WoBbLe model as a practical tool for maintaining balance during challenging times.
Teach Mental Resilience: Resilience Planning Primary
The culminating lesson of the Teach Mental Resilience course, this session brings together everything students have learned to create a personal Resilience Plan. Students reflect on their journey through the course and build a practical, personalised toolkit for maintaining and growing their resilience going forward.
About the organisation
Bounce Forward
Bounce Forward is a registered charity on a mission to transform how we think about mental health, shifting the narrative from deficit and crisis to strength, prevention, and psychological fitness. They create evidence-based programmes, curricula, and training that give young people, school staff, and the adults around children the knowledge, language, and daily habits to build genuine mental resilience. From whole-staff training to five-year school curricula, everything they do is practical, grounded in science, and designed to make a lasting difference not just in the moment, but across a lifetime.