Children's Mental Health Week

Children's Mental Health Week took place this week 7-13 February 2022. This year's theme is Growing Together. This week the children took part in a wide range of activities and were encouraged to consider how they have grown, and how they can help others to grow. Please see the photos below.

Primary 1 took part in lots of lovely well-being activities this week for Children's Well-Being week. They made their own worry sticks and added some magical worry glitter that takes away all of their worries. They also made and enjoyed playing with lavender play-doh. On Friday afternoon they also had some yoga. Well done, Primary 1! 

In Primary 3 Mrs Poacher encouraged the children to consider how they have grown and how they can help others to grow. What better way to show growth than planting flowers and seeds!  Gardening together was a fun, physical way for the children to learn the art of patience.  Plants don’t sprout overnight, so children need to learn to be patient and wait for their seeds to grow.  From water to weeding, plants require care and commitment in order to thrive. Giving daily attention to our class plants and looking after them will help give our P3 children a sense of purpose and excitement.  Having lots of lovely spring plants around the classroom will help with the childrens' emotional wellbeing.

Have a look at some of Primary 4's Well-Being activities this week. They made Well-Being toolboxes which contained various coping tools. They also made worry puppets. In these worry puppets each child wrote their favourite positive quote that they can read when they need to. Well done, Primary 4. 

To celebrate Children's Mental Health Week in Primary 5, we particpated in a range of different activities throughout the week. We created our own ‘Support Balloons’ and considered all the wonderful people in our lives who help us to grow and people who 'lift us up' when things get tough or we need support. These people included parents, carers, siblings, friends and teachers. Miss Canavan also set us a tricky task in creating a paper penguin using very few instructions. This allowed for a great discussion about developing a growth mindset and how having a positive, resilient attitude to learning and new experiences is a really great thing. Finally, we talked about how exercise is great for our mental health as well as physical health and we got outside for our daily mile. Have a look at our pictures to see us in action!

This week the Primary 6 children have loved taking part in mental health week. We wanted to trial a range of activities to see which we enjoyed the best, so that we could use these techniques as coping mechanisms when we feel any negative emotions.

Some of our activities included:

• Doodle art,
• Making DIY stress balls,
• Creating a poem for the ‘AWARE’ competition based on mental health,
• Practising breathing techniques, including ‘square breathing’,
• ‘Cracking mathematical codes’ to work out shock statistics about children’s thoughts and perceptions of their own body image,
• Interval running around the track,
• Singing – We learnt two pop songs, ‘Rise’ and ‘High Hopes’.

We took part in class discussions throughout the week and also realised that not every child liked every activity. We thought about which of the activities we liked the best and which ones lifted our mood the most. We will remember this for when we may need to self-regulate and bring ourselves ‘back to calm’ in the future.

Primary 7 focused on simple activities we could do everyday to help relieve stress or anxiety and improve our mental health.  These activities included brain breaks in our learning where we completed excercises at our desks, the daily mile around the school grounds, mindfullness colouring and different breathing strategies.  We learned about the impact physical activity can have not only on our physical health but also our mental health.  We even got to race against Mrs Mc Cann and Mr Morrow on Friday.  We discussed how we can get help if we are having a problem and who in school and outside of school can provide us with help.