The 10th October is World Mental Health Day, let’s all come together to talk about mental health and show everyone that mental health matters.

We at Hugo Meynell will be thinking about how to promote positive mental health and to support each other. Come back later to see what we have been doing.

Nursey have read The colour monster and talked about different feelings. We had a giggle making our yellow bananas into smiles as they are yellow and make us happy.

Today Reception talked about what it means to have a healthy mind and body. We talked about our different emotions and how these can affect our choices. We talked about who can help us when we need to talk and what makes us happy.

We also did some mindfulness breathing exercises during our snack time!

Year 1 kicked off the day by getting active outside and developing their core skills. They identified different emotions, how they are shown and also noticed that it can sometimes be tricky to work out how other children are feeling. They completed a full body scan to work out their own feelings and shared ideas about what they can do to improve their own mental health. Some children like to cuddle up under a blanket, read a book, draw pictures or do some energetic exercise! What a wonderful day!

In Year 2, we started our session by playing 'Emotion Charades', where we would show an emotion on our face and the rest of the class would guess which one it was.

We spoke about how sometimes our emotions are obvious like in the game, and sometimes we can hide them a little better but that might make them more uncomfortable. We spoke about lots of different ways we could deal with strong emotions and who would be there to support us when we needed it. We then completed lots of activities to help us remember how amazing we are!

Year 3 have been thinking about how different feelings can affect us. They learnt that you can experience over 400 emotional experiences every day. They talked about how they can keep their minds healthy and what they could do to do this. They also talked about who are their trusted adults to go to if they need help.

Taking care of your mental health is important, year 3 explored the acronym ‘Yellow’ and how it can support their own mental health.

Y - Your feelings matter

E - Everyone needs support

L- Listen to your body

L - Learn to relax

O - Offer kindness

W - Wiggle and move

This morning, year 4 started with some mindful colouring in. They did the mental health awareness assembly, talking about what mental health is and where they can go for help if they are not feeling good. They thought about all the different feelings that they could have and the fact that it is ok to feel any of these emotions, but that there are people to help us if are experiencing uncomfortable emotions.

They thought of all the different things that might help our mental health and the things that they can do to help other people feel good, they all wrote a post it note with an idea for each.

They finished the session with some mindfulness/relation exercises, and they did a bit of stretching.

Today, Y5 have had a look at mental health and how to promote positivity in order to stay feeling good about themselves. We had lots of discussions about feelings and how to put names to describe our emotions. The children were eager to show ways that help them to stay feeling positive and how to help others who may need a helping hand.

The children created posters on how to use ‘5 a day for the brain’ to help mental health, connected with other people in the class based on their opinions and thought about 3 steps they could take in order to achieve a new goal.

Well done Year 5 for your mature and positive approach to Mental Health Day!

Year 6 have been learning how to keep their minds healthy in 5 different ways. They have discovered that, in order to look after their mental health, we should all follow a 5 a day rule, just like we do with 5 a day fruit and veg to keep our bodies healthy. The children made posters to show the 'mind 5 a day' and to highlight the 5 key initiatives which are:

1. Connect with others

2. Give to others

3. Be active

4. Keep Learning

5. Take notice

We heard some inspirational stories from some teenagers who were following the mind 5 a day initiative and even created some plans of our own to work on the 'Keep Learning' and 'Connect with Others' aspects.