This week across the school, we celebrated Children’s Mental Health Week. The theme for this year is ‘This is My Place’, which is based around belonging and how we can feel a sense of belonging and help others feel like they belong. We also spoke about the importance of recognising how someone might be feeling and asking them if they are okay.

Each year group watched the online Picture News assembly celebrating Children’s Mental Health Week and took part in different activities to help children feel like they belong and helping each other to recognise feelings and emotions.

In Reception,

We have been talking about things that make us happy and things we enjoy. The children enjoyed sharing their ideas and creating their own “things I love” poster 😊

In Year 1, children discussed how they can feel happy and safe. Here are some things that children said:

Emily: Mental Health week is about understanding your feelings.

Sienna: I feel I belong in my dance club because I have lots of friends who are kind.

Seb: It is about feeling like you belong.  I feel like I belong with my friends at school because they make me feel happy and I have fun at school.

In Year 2, children spoke about different ways that we can help children feel like they belong.

Darcey: We can ask someone to play with us if they are alone. 

Callen: Be kind to others

We also played the ‘Emotions Heads Up Game’. In the game we used facial expression and description to show an emotion to our partner. Our partner then had to guess what the emotion was. From this, we spoke about how we could help each other when we are feeling different emotions.

In Year 3, the teachers spoke to the children about belonging. They brainstormed ideas where the children felt that they belonged – a place or person where they felt safe and comfortable and could talk about their feelings. Children then thought of four different places where they belonged and decorated their poster with pictures and words.

In Year 4, children listened to author Katie Hopper’s new book ‘Sylvia’s Candle’ which was all about feelings that you couldn’t name but could describe. They then got to do some fun activities linked to the live assembly. Some children played a game that helped describe emotions, some created a mosaic of what makes us special which will be displayed in class to show that we all belong, some children drew an illustration for one of Katie’s new books that helps show a character’s feelings and finally some children created posters with their name on and drew things that interest them and what bring them joy!

In Year 5, children talked about a sense of belonging and how it helped their mental health. They then designed a ‘BELONGING BOOK’ where children drew pictures of themselves. Mrs Penfold and Mr White collected them in. They were then handed to other children in the class who added a positive comment to the speech bubbles about the person.

In Year 6, children spoke about belonging and what this means. They each made a mosaic by each producing a square that represents us and then putting these all together to show that we belong.

In Crossbar lessons, children started the lesson with yoga and wellbeing exercises. This made sure we felt relaxed and ready to learn!