SQUAD - Teen Podcast
Little Troopers has launched a brand-new podcast called SQUAD featuring lots of military teenagers talking about growing up in the military community. Across eight episodes we speak to 15 teens who all have a different story to tell.
What is SQUAD?
SQUAD is a podcast for military teenagers. It’s the first podcast of its kind to hand the microphone over to military children aged 13-18 and ask them to share their own views and experiences of military life.
Presented by TV & radio broadcaster and mental health ambassador, Katie Thistleton and rugby player and Little Troopers Ambassador, Thom Smith, each episode features a group of teenagers chatting about deployment, moving school, moving home, making friends and other things that are unique to forces life.
Where can I listen to SQUAD?
Anyone can listen to SQUAD because it’s freely available whenever you usually get your podcasts. Teenagers can listen to it at home or in school.
We visited Stonehenge School and saw how they use SQUAD in school with military teens, watch how to get the most out of SQUAD the podcast .
How can I use SQUAD in school?
SQUAD is a free interactive resource that secondary schools can use to support service children in the classroom. It gives schools a reason to bring their service children together and explore some of the challenges that children might be experiencing that are unique to military life, such as deployment, separation, moving home and moving school. Each episode is only twenty minutes long, so you can listen to it as a group or ask children to listen to it in advance of the session.
Each episode also comes with an activity sheet that has been written by an Education Psychologist to help you facilitate classroom discussion and ensure that students get the most out of each session. All of the accompanying activity sheets are free to download.
ExpertView
SQUAD isn’t just useful for military teens, it also gives an invaluable insight into being a military teenager for both parents and teachers.
In episode eight of series one, we invited Educational Psychologist, Tamsin Messeter, onto the podcast to delve a little deeper into some of the conversations from the series and offer teachers and parents advice on how to support service children during more challenging times.
We have turned this episode into a series of bitesize video clips that you can watch independently or use as an education training resource.