Student practice – Mental health week

 Student practice – Mental health week

For the first week of February, it was children's mental health week (1-7 February 2021). As means of building awareness, the school (where I am completing my internship) organized a few activities and events for pupils. 

There has never been a more important time to talk about well-being and mental health. Especially in these hard times, a special task to support and encourage children and parents to find ways to share their thoughts and feelings. When one thinks about mental health, children are often excluded. Thus, I greatly appreciate that the school included our pupils and giving them tasks to express their feelings and ways to cope with them. 

mentor teacher prepared a delightful week with genius activities – so I had to show you guys. 

The morning started with an encouraging message with a few minutes of silence for meditation and self-reflection. Starting the day off with encouraging words allowed them to be filled with love and be ready to start their day on the right foot. Later, there were special visitors for the students, as two alpacas came to the school and visited different classes. Animals provides a therapeutic benefit through companionship. The animal provides emotional support and comfort to individuals with psychiatric disabilities and other mental impairments. 

As an additional task, students created their own diy alpacas to remember their visit with a short story about them. These stories were quite encouraging as the main protagonist (the alpaca) went on a grave journey and discovered ways to deal with it. 

Art activity: to draw a continuous line on a piece of paper , and use various colours in between the lines. It was enjoyable for the students to express themselves as well as guess what their pictures resembles and self-reflect how it connects to themselves. It was a good activity to help kids use creative expression, talking about their art, and using art as a meaningful outlet for emotions.

Another thing was creating a mental-health check-in, this was a chart is for students to place their self-made pictures in whatever section that best describes how they're feeling. This is a good activity to get students aware of their emotions of the day. The teacher can provide additional support for the student such as having a nice chat with them to understand their feelings and provide a helping hand. I also like that students could visually see that they aren't alone in their struggles.

By the end of the week, to further express themselves, students designed their own custom t-shirts and later, they showed off their designs in the final dance party. The dance party was where they let their worries go and enjoy the moment. It was nice to see that they gave complements to each other’s t-shirts and felt proud with what they created. To complete the day, student also release some of their energy by playing games with balloons and dancing. 

Overall, I thought it was great to incorporate a serious issue with students and giving them a chance to be aware of their emotions, of others and be accepted for the way they are feeling. I think this is an important lesson to learn in life and I am so glad to be able to experience this event!

Please leave a comment on your thoughts about this topic, 

Sara