Children's mental health week Archives

Family Conversation Cards

February 7, 2019 By Zoe Ross

These family conversation cards are designed to help you talk to your child in a positive way about your day.

On the first page there are suggestions for how to use them. You just need to print them out, cut them up and give them a go!

Click to download the cards now

You might also like this post on 10 ways to support your child’s mental health and wellbeing.

Children’s Mental Health Week Kindness Quotes and Slogans Activity

February 9, 2017 By Zoe Ross

Kindness-Matters
Suitability
This activity can be used for any age pupil but can be easily adapted for younger pupils by providing different sentence starters for children to use to help them come up with their own quotes.

Overview
This activity asks pupils to create a slogan or quote about kindness and being kind to others. It encourages children to think about what the definition of kindness is and how this can relate to other people. It helps them to think about acts of kindness.

Introduction

Ask pairs of pupils to think about what kindness means to them.
Discuss as a class and decide on a definition.
Share some of the ways that kindness can be shown? E.g. kindness can be an action, a small action, which we make a choice to help somebody and make them feel better about themselves. It can have a big impact on people around us.

What does kindness look like?

Ask 2 pupils to come to the front and give them a toy to play with.
Prime one of the pupils to snatch the toy from the other.
Discuss how that felt.
Ask the pupils to model how playing with the toy with kindness might look in contrast.
If you wish, give a toy to all pairs to repeat.

Main

Show pupils some different quotes about kindness and acts of kindness. E.g.No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted. – Aesop.
Discuss as a class what these might mean.
Show pupils some different slogans about kindness. Discuss with the children what these might mean. E.g. Kindness can change the world. (An online search for ‘kindness quotes and slogans for children‘ returns many examples to use. And there are some more here.)
Ask pupils to think/pair/share what the difference is between a slogan and a quote?
A quote is a saying or a statement of somebody’s thoughts or opinions. A slogan is used by an organisation usually as a way of attracting attention. It is a phrase which is easily remembered.
Ask pupils to group different statements and phrases into quotes and slogans.
Invite them to identify and explain why they would be quotes or slogans and explain?

Creating a kindness quote or slogan

Give out appropriate materials and ask pupils to design their own quotes and/or slogans about kindness for a display in the classroom.
To help those who may struggle to come up with their own ideas, pupils could work in supportive groupings, use the quotes/slogans from the grouping activity or some sentence starters to help them.

Plenary

Ask pupils to stick their slogans and quotes on the wall and share as a class.
Discuss how they make them feel about kindness.
They could take some home to share.

Ideas for extension

Pupils could use their slogans/quotes and come up with a persuasive poster or letter to encourage the class (or another class) to be kind to others.

Children’s Mental Health Week Small Acts of Kindness Activity

February 7, 2017 By Zoe Ross

mind-moose-small-acts-of-kindness-image

Click here to download PDF

Suitability
This ‘Small Acts of Kindness’ activity can be used for primary pupils of any age. Instead of writing, younger pupils can draw or photograph small acts of kindness to use in the ‘kindness cards’ activity.

Overview
This activity focuses on all acts of kindness, but especially those small acts that can make a very real difference to people’s lives and impact positively on each other, our schools, communities and the wider world.

Introduction

What is kindness? Come up with an agreed definition as a class.
Introduce the idea of a ‘small act of kindness’. What might this be?
Discuss what small acts of kindness pupils have come across in their lives – perhaps they have been kind to others, or others have been kind to them. What did they do and how did this make them feel? How did it make other people feel?
Discuss why a small act such as tidying something up without being asked, saying thank you to someone or giving them a hug, or helping a friend with something they are struggling with like homework may help to put a smile on somebody’s face.

Kindness in the wider world

Share with older pupils the idea of suspended coffees and discuss how acts of kindness can be monetary in terms of buying a coffee for somebody.
Share and discuss the idea of alternative advent calendars, where instead of opening a door each day for advent prior to the Christian Christmas celebration, some people put an item into a box and on the final day they gave the box to somebody in need.

Creating Kindness Cards

Give out pieces of card and coloured pens to pupils and ask them to create small cards with a small act of kindness that can be done in school written on each of them. Depending on your class, you may need to offer additional support or ask pupils to work in pairs or small groups. For those who struggle to write in full sentences, they could draw or take photographs and add captions to them.
Discuss how these acts might help somebody and what the feelings for the giver and the receiver might be.
Emphasise that this isn’t about spending money on doing something to help somebody but it is about the act itself. A small act can have a huge impact. E.g. smiling at somebody who is unhappy will help them feel that someone has noticed and cares.
Put the cards in a suitable ‘kindness box’ and every morning ask each child to take out a card and perform that act of kindness. You could put a sticker or smiley face on a reward card so pupils can see how many acts they have performed over a week/month.

Plenary

Discuss how the acts of kindness can help to improve the world we live in. Ask pupils to share their ideas for small acts of kindness they could do at home or in their community.
Keep talking about the acts of kindness over the course of the week as the pupils perform them and beyond. How did it make them feel to give or receive a small act of kindness?

Ideas for extension:

Pupils could create a bar chart for how many different times a particular act of kindness card was used so they can see the impact they have had on their class or the whole school.

Ideas for small acts of kindness:

Smile at 5 people today
Ask someone to join in a game
Help to organise or sort out equipment in the classroom
Write a letter or card to a friend
Give someone a compliment
Make a special effort to say thank you
Draw a picture for someone
Say thank you in a different language to your own 6 times today
Help a friend with something you know they find tricky

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Kindness Poem Activity

February 5, 2017 By Zoe Ross

Click here to download PDF

Suitability
This ‘Kindness Poem’ activity can be used for Key Stage 2 pupils. It is most suited to Years 4-6 as it includes the use of abstract nouns, however, it can be easily adapted for younger pupils.

Overview

The activity asks pupils to create a poem about kindness using their senses. It asks them to think about how they can describe kindness (an abstract noun) using adjectives, adverbs and nouns (extending to using similes, metaphors and personification).

Introduction

Introduce the word kindness to pupils.
What do they think this might mean for themselves and for others?
Discuss with pupils when they have been kind to somebody or someone has been kind to them. What happened? How did this make them feel about being kind?

Main

Look at what an abstract noun is and your own definition of it.
E.g. An abstract noun represents something that can’t be be seen, heard, smelt, felt or tasted, for example truth, danger, freedom, happiness, rather than a concrete object.

Mind maps

Ask pupils to create a mind map about kindness separating it into what colour it might be and also into senses, e.g. what it might look like, smell like, taste like, feel like (as in touch), and what it might sound like.
Encourage pupils to add in adjectives and adverbs for each part of the mind map. E.g. Colour – yellow, pink, green etc… Sight – looks like butterflies, birds etc… Smell – rain, flowers in spring. Taste (this one can be tricky) – candyfloss, chocolate etc… Touch – wind etc… Sound – music etc…
Challenge pupils to come up with as many adjectives and adverbs as they can think of for each section of the mind map.
Invite pupils to share their ideas with a partner or in a small group and to add any additional ideas to their mind map.

Creating poems

Ask pupils to choose their favourite word from each section, highlight it and use a thesaurus to find different words to mean the same thing.
Challenge pupils to extend these into phrases adding in lots of description to each phrase, e.g. Kindness is the colour of sunshine yellow bursting through the clouds on a dark and dismal day….
Ask pupils, either working alone or in pairs, can come up with their poem for kindness using a format similar to below or a format of their own choosing

Kindness is the colour of…
It smells like…
It sounds like…
It feels like…
It looks like…
It tastes like….
When I am kind I feel…

Plenary:

Share the children’s poems as a whole class and make a kindness display including their work.

Ideas for extension:

Encourage children to use expanded noun phrases as well as similes, metaphors and personification in their poem.

Children’s Mental Health Week Resources

February 5, 2017 By Zoe Ross

2018 ‘Being Ourselves’ Resources

The theme of this year’s Children’s Mental Health Week is a wonderful one, ‘Being Ourselves, which encouraged children to celebrate their uniqueness.

One of the easiest and best ways to do this, is to encourage them to think about their ‘good qualities’. Here are a couple of easy activities that can get you started. They are really easy to fit into the school day and a warm glow afterwards is pretty much guaranteed!

As always, there are superb resources at Place2Be with more information about why this theme is so important, assemblies and more lesson ideas.

2017 ‘Kindness’ Resources

mind-moose-childrens-mental-health-week-free-resources This coming week 5th -9th February 2017 is Children’s Mental Health Week, with the theme of ‘kindness’.

The charity Place2Be has created a ‘big assembly’ and some useful free resources on their website.

We thought we’d also create and share some activities and lessons that we hope you’ll find useful to use with your primary classes. They’re easy to use and adapt for your pupils, written by experienced teachers and ready to just pick up and use! We’ll be adding more over the course of the week and hope you enjoy using them.

The first activity is a Kindness Poem; An activity designed to fit easily into a KS2 English lesson.

The second activity is a ‘Small Acts of Kindness Activity’ where children think of and create kindness cards featuring small acts of kindness they can perform throughout the school day’.

Lastly, the third activity is ‘Kindness Quotes and Slogans‘; An activity designed to improve pupils’ creativity and literacy skills and get them thinking about what kindness is.

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