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 the UK’s psychological-fitness charity.
We help children and young people — and the adults and environments around them — develop the understanding, skills and shared language to regulate, recover and adapt through challenge, change and everyday life.
Our work brings together mental resilience and emotional wellbeing, shifting the focus upstream: building capability before crisis, rather than waiting for something to go wrong. We translate evidence from psychology, resilience research, cognitive behavioural approaches and positive psychology into practical learning that can be taught, modelled and used in real life.
From evidence-informed curricula and staff development to family support and whole-community approaches, our work recognises that young people do not develop in isolation. What happens around a young person shapes what becomes possible within them.
Everything we create is practical, grounded in evidence and designed to build something that lasts — psychologically fit people and communities, better prepared to meet life.