For this year’s Mental Health Day, children dressed in a colour related to a particular emotion. Children could choose the colour that they wished to represent the fact that all emotions are acceptable. At Uplands, we encourage children to use words to describe the way they are feeling and we support them in self regulation.
This week is Children’s Mental Health Week. At Uplands Junior L.E.A.D. Academy, we discussed the importance of sharing our voices and views to make a difference. Our voices matter and we have the right to be heard and taken seriously! When we work in a team, our voices can lead to change. Expressing our views build’s our self-esteem and promotes good mental health.
The children have been raising money for the Place2Be charity which helps improve children’s and young people’s mental health.
So far, we have raised £258.83, a big thank you to our generous parents and carers, we will continue collecting donations until Friday.
Mental Health has been a huge topic of discussion this year. The children have been learning about different ways to look after their own mental health.
There is a mood scale in each classroom with a number allocated to each child. This way, children can share how they are feeling privately. This gives the class teacher or class TA the opportunity to deal with any worries, anxieties or incidents.
Mr Walker and Mrs Shaukat focussed closely on loneliness and how feeling lonely can impact our mental health. We have had a few incidents where children have reported that they have nobody to play with. The came up with some great solutions to solve this problem.
All students in the school had the task to create a poster to explain how they can support individuals suffering from loneliness. The children created some beautiful work and have it displayed in our reading corner.
Mr Walker is part of a program led by the Anna Freud Centre. Using their evidence-based research he introduced ‘Peer Mentoring’. This is preventative support that focuses on building resilience and promoting wellbeing necessary to meet children and young people’s mental health needs.
Children in Year 5 and 6 had the opportunity to apply, there was a lot of competition…Mrs Shaukat and Mr Walker had a difficult time choosing the only ten students to become Upland Junior LEAD Academy Peer Mentors.
Friday 10th February was Dress to Express Day. Each class thought about things that are unique to themselves. It was a good opportunity for pupils and staff to be open about mental health and start speaking about what helps them. All year groups created a class poster to share with the rest of the school. Please scroll through the posters below.
The children were treated to The Kindness Workshop by 52 lives. The workshop aimed to highlight the importance of kindness and how a small act of kindness can impact a huge number of people. The children correctly identified that being kind was by being ‘friendly, considerate and geneorus’.
WATCH THIS SPACE. We will add some works of kindness that the children created.
Brené Brown explains why “empathy fuels connection and sympathy drives disconnection” in this animated video snippet
