Children’s Mental Health Week 1st- 7th February- Express Yourself

I hope that you and your family are well and keeping safe during these difficult times. The Covid pandemic has presented us all with many challenges, and here at Calverley CE school alongside continuing to support your child with their academic learning, we believe that it is very important that we continue to support all our children’s positive emotional health and wellbeing and development as best we can. With this in mind, we have been very busy planning  some fun activities for all the children to do, as part of Children’s Mental Health Week next week. 

The theme of the week is   ‘Express Yourself which will be all about helping children to express themselves, their feelings, thoughts, & likes and dislikes through creative ways.  Children will be encouraged throughout the week to try out different ways of expressing themselves in a variety of creative ways.

On Monday there will be an Oak National assembly for everyone in school.  This will be to launch the Children’s Mental Health Week to everyone. As a school, are also lucky enough to work in partnership with an organisation called Jenby’s which is led by Dr Natalie Jewitt who is a Clinical Psychologist. She has provided us with activities and tasks for the children to complete this week. These activities will hopefully help to support the children’s own positive emotional health and wellbeing, as well as giving them practical strategies to help them deal with problems and challenges. 

Non Screen Wellbeing Wednesday afternoon

As part of the week’s activities, we have planned a whole school, non - screen afternoon of activities on Wednesday 3rd February. The aim of this is to give everyone a break from looking at a screen. On Wednesday afternoon we will send out a menu of different activities that do not need a screen to complete. This means that all the children will have two lessons in the morning as normal and then no screen activity for that afternoon. The idea is to choose some different wellbeing activities from the menu to do, and for everyone to have a break and not look at a screen at all. We hope to continue our  non screen Wellbeing Wednesdays on a weekly basis moving forward. Please do share with us, what you enjoyed doing that afternoon if you would like to. It would be lovely to see any  pictures of cakes you baked or pictures you have painted 

We really hope that your child finds the activities fun, enjoyable and of course useful helping to support their overall wellbeing, emotional and mental health, especially. Please do remember that along with our weekly wellbeing phone calls from the staff to our families, that we are here to offer any help and support that we can to our whole school community. Just a reminder that Miss O’Hara and Mrs Dixon are both 

qualified Youth Mental First Aiders and there is also a list of resources and websites that offer lots of support and advice on Emotional Health and Wellbeing for adults and children.

Please do not hesitate to contact school via phone or email, if you feel that we at school can be of any help at all especially at this difficult time.

Yours sincerely,

Miss O’Hara

Deputy Head