MENTAL HEALTH and wellbeing
At Broadstone First School we aim to promote positive mental health and wellbeing for our whole school community (learners, staff, parents and carers). We understand the importance of positive mental health and that this is just as important as physical health.
Our role in school is to ensure that children are able to manage times of change and stress, and that they are supported and can access help when they need it. We are continually striving to ensure that our learners learn what they can do to maintain positive mental health, what affects their mental health, how they can help reduce the stigma surrounding mental health issues, and where they can go if they need help and support.
Children and young people may experience a wide range of social and emotional difficulties which manifest themselves in many ways. These may include becoming withdrawn or isolated, as well as displaying challenging, disruptive or disturbing behaviour. Broadstone First School ensure that Social, Emotional and Mental Health is at the heart of our school. We aim to support our learners in recognising their emotions and develop strategies to regulate them by having a toolkit of calming activities. We ensure that we enable children to have the time and space to regulate their emotions and practice de-escalation strategies to enable them to be ‘Ready to Learn’. We support our learner’s mental health in school in a number of ways:
- All our staff support our learner’s wellbeing through the building of strong caring relationships.
- Our PSHE lessons support emotional well-being and encourage children to learn about physical and mental health. The concepts covered in PSHE include keeping safe and managing risk, identity, equality, managing feelings and emotions, relationships, change, resilience and being healthy, which includes physical, mental, emotional and social well-being.
- Good mental health and wellbeing is just as important as good physical health. Like physical health, mental health can range across a spectrum from healthy to unwell; it can fluctuate on a daily basis and change over time. Learners at Broadstone First School have two lessons of PE each week. A wide range of sport-related after school clubs are run by BFS staff and external coaches, whilst all our learners during their time at BFS take part in inter-school sporting events which include experiencing an extensive range of sports and activities. Playground Pals and Sports Ambassadors help to support relationship building during breaktimes and lunchtimes and are excellent at organising activities and games to encourage physical activity and promote inclusion respectively
Useful resources to read
Useful Websites
Kids Baking recipes
Easy Kids Crafts
Mindfulness and yoga
Things to try (click on images / videos to enlarge)
Ideas for getting creative! (click on images to enlarge)
