'Be Kind To Your Mind'
LWS Autumn Term Project 2022
Project Overview
Now, more than ever, it is important that we give our children the tools needed to promote positive mental wellbeing. Research has demonstrated the importance of providing young people with the opportunity to learn about mental health as part of the curriculum, especially as it improves mental health literacy and evidence suggests that developing social and emotional regulation skills is particularly effective (BERA, 19).
Our children will cultivate the skills to thrive in the present moment and contribute to society with their full potential, as grounded and compassionate human beings. The children will campaign to promote the positive mental wellbeing of our LWS community through this wonderful, nurturing project.
'Every one of us needs to show how we care for each and, in the process, care for ourselves.' Princess Diana
Project End Goal - Our Big Question
How and why should we care for our mental wellbeing?
Steps to Success
1) What does 'mental wellbeing' mean and why is it so important?
2) How can we look after our mental wellbeing?
3) What can we do to support the mental wellbeing of others?
This project was co-designed with the members of the Hawks class.
Project Introduction
16/09/22 I can co-design a project
After discussing the brief of our project, working in small groups, we collaborated to develop project proposals and offer our imaginative ideas to the planning of our important new project. Thinking carefully about the purpose of our project, we outlined ideas for the skills we may need to develop, potential trips and visitors, as well as our steps for learning. We will be creating a school magazine to share our ideas about mental wellbeing from this project and help others to understand and take positive action too. To highlight World Mental Health Day, during the week of October 10th, we will also be planning a special contribution to our whole school morning meeting.
Step 1
23_09 I can understand what 'mental wellbeing' is.
During this shorter week, we took to exploring the terms 'mental wellbeing' and 'mental health'. We discussed the ways we look after ourselves physically and how it is just as important to do the same to support our mental wellbeing. We discussed the difference between mental wellbeing and mental health and how these can sometimes also be used interchangeably. We worked in small groups to either present or use our drama skills to share our understanding of mental wellbeing/mental health. In order to get a sense of our mental wellbeing, we completed a reflection task that inspired us to think about what we feel, think, wish, need, hope and want. It is amazing what we can tune into when we allow ourselves the time!
Step 2
30_09 I can recognise, describe and use strategies to support my emotions.
Supporting our mental wellbeing is extremely important and one of the ways in which we can do so is to be able to recognise and name how we are feeling and to then adopt a strategy to help. This week, this was our focus as we dug deep into the 'Zones of Regulation' and what they actually mean to us.
After watching some interesting videos that illustrated the zones in different ways, we worked in groups to develop our language around emotions and feelings and generated these wonderful word banks to guide us with our ability to describe specific feelings within each zone. Discussing how our minds can feel is important for 'tuning in' but we also explored how our body can experience physical changes when in the different zones.
Next we read the 'Changing Emotions' text and listed many of the new strategies suggested, before adding our own from our personal experiences and some further research. We sorted these into the different zones as it was very clear that different tools help us as different times, depending on how we are feeling. Through our class discussion, we demonstrated great reasoning around how the different methods support us and really focused on specific details about each tool, to ensure they help us each individually. We are very excited to be making our personal toolkit lanyards next week!
Step 2
7_10 I can understand the impact of my thoughts.
This week, we began with confirming our Zones of Regulation tool kits and justifying the strategies that we have chosen for each zone that will support us to return back to the 'green zone' which is optimum for our ability to learn. Putting care, effort and creativity into their designs, we have now created our personalised tool kits to support our regulation in school.
Next, we took a look at the nature of our thoughts and discussed how they can be either helpful or unhelpful. We distinguished between the two and, as a class, sorted through a range of common thoughts and shared examples of how we could reframe some unhelpful thoughts into more positive, helpful thinking. Linking to mental wellbeing, we explored how unhelpful thoughts, if left unmanaged, can lead to a decline in our mental wellbeing and so it is so very important for us to tune into our thinking and ensure the balance is healthy. Unpicking the popular saying 'a penny for your thoughts' we spoke of how it is important to check in with the people around us if we can see that they are deep in thought as they may want to 'get out of their head' and chat about things on their mind. Sitting in our mindful spots, we focused on our breathing and then tuned into our thinking and identified examples of helpful and unhelpful thoughts.
Knowing about the power of our thoughts, we now recognised that we would need to learn about different strategies to support us when we are experiencing too many unhelpful thoughts. Looking at a range of strategies, we shared our own personal experiences or ideas about them and some of us even brought in some examples to share and inspire the class. With our empowering information, we took to the task of creating a 'thoughts superhero' who would help protect us from unhelpful thoughts by reminder us of helpful thoughts or strategies that could replace or overcome that way of thinking. Now, we always have someone to count on to battle those inner thoughts that can sometimes be very unhelpful!
Step 3
14_10 I can spread awareness about mental health
.It was World Mental Health Day on Monday 10th October and it was the perfect way to look at the bigger picture and how important it is that we make mental wellbeing a priority. The theme of this year's awareness was Make mental health & well-being for all a global priority , .so we discussed how we could bring attention to this in our own school and what ideas we would like to share in the whole school morning meeting. Once we had decided on the content of our presentation, we split into small groups and used our previous learning resources and work to research the information and brilliant ideas we needed to create our scripts. On Wednesday, we were lucky to have some visitors join us for the day and we performed our script to them in order to receive some helpful feedback for next steps and positive praise for our hard work so far. At the end of the week, we shared our message with the whole school in a very powerful morning meeting and it was great to hear and see so many of school friends talking about mental wellbeing and how we can all support one another.
Step 1
21_10 I can research data about children's mental health in the U.K.
As we draw into our final week of the project, we zoomed out of thinking about our selves and our friends and took a look at the mental wellbeing and health of other children around the U.K.
We explored the report produced by 'The Children's Society' that looked into the happiness and wellbeing of children across the country. 'The Good Childhood Report 2022' shared interesting results about how happy children are with their lives, how well they coped with Coronavirus and their worries. This created powerful class discussions as we were able to share some of our experiences and reflect on some of the things we were grateful for. Next, we studied the findings of the NHS survey exploring the mental health of children and young people in 2017 and 2021. We recognised that the last few years have been tough for children and this has had an impact on key things such as sleep and school attendance. With this in mind, we then looked at the magnificent work of an organisation called 'Place 2 Be' that support the mental wellbeing of children in schools. We were delighted to see the positive impact of this strategy in schools.
Once we had understood the data from these important reports, we defined what an infographic is and why they are a great way of sharing important data in a visual and quick to understand way. As a class, we developed a success criteria for the features of an effective infographic, before creating some very eye-catching digital infographics. Some of us focused on one report, whilst others shared data from up to three different sources! We thought carefully about the colours we used, the images to include and some of us even created pictograms to make clear the hard-hitting but important national trends in children's mental health. Ending the week, we felt very proud of our project and how we can raise awareness and make a difference to both our own and others' mental wellbeing.
End of Project Reflection
4_11 I can reflect on my understanding of mental wellbeing and how to support myself and others.
Our project drew to a close this week as welcomed '2020 Dreams' to our school to host a series of workshops around mental health and wellbeing and opportunity for us to reflect on all that we have grown to understand and our achievements last half term. Our first session was around 'Mental Wellbeing and Positive Thinking' where we discussed the importance of mental health and wellbeing and also shared our experiences of the impact of lockdowns, both positive and negative. This allowed us to value the fact that everyone had and has such different experiences and how this plays out into the world around us. After some lovely singing of affirmations and chat around their positive impact, we created our own individual affirmations posters to help us to build positive thinking. Next, we explored 'Emotional Resilience' and how important the role of hope is in our lives. We looked at the different ways of building resilience and the understanding of life's ups and downs and how powerful resilience is in achieving a life we are proud of. Making our own 'Circles of Life', we reflected upon the people, places and things that support us with building resilience when things sometimes get tricky. During our final session 'Supportive Friendships' we discussed what it is to be a good friend and how to reach out when you notice they might not be ok. So much can be achieved if we have the right support around us; we ended our session using Canva to make a visual representation of all that we want to achieve in our lives.
Please contact the Hawks to ask questions here:
info@libertywoodlandschool.com