Well-being Day for all

Read about what we are doing to support our pupils and their ability to talk about emotions. (Whole School - 19/07/2022)

Well-being day for all…

A day to support pupils in their ability to articulate their emotions, apply strategies and create a safe space for all.

Well-being and looking after all of our family members is at the heart of what we do at Firbeck. It is about being kind to yourself and others, so on Friday all the children took part in an emotional literacy well-being day.
To help support this process all children watch the film ‘Inside Out’ which helps pupils to gain a visual understanding of how our emotions can affect our behaviours and attitudes. It is important that in order to manage them, we must be able to name them and identify each one.

After the film had completed, children went back to their classrooms to begin to discuss key themes they had identified. Their were some very powerful conversations where children were able to identify situations they had felt various emotions, similar to the main character Riley. They began to unpick the difference between emotions and really deepen their understanding for example, what is the difference between anger and frustration? How do they present themselves? What situations may cause us to feel these feelings? What strategies could we use to help
manage these feelings?Some of the key strategies we looked at to support us when we are feeling angry or any other negative emotion were our 5 finger breathing.

After lunch pupils returned to their classrooms where they then took part in some focused creative activities.
Early Years created wooden puppets of themselves feeling a particular emotion to support discussions around naming emotions.

Y1 created paper plate faces demonstrating various different expressions that would match particular emotions.
Y2 played a matching game with pictorial representations of emotions and the names of the emotions.

Y3 created mindful wind mobiles to help support them when they are struggling to self regulate.

Y4 wrote positive affirmations cards about themselves to build confidence.

Y5 completed their star personality to identify the characteristics they most admire about themselves.

Y6 completed the house of worries/good memories to help support their transition and open conversations about the future.

Y1 creating some expressions to match with the emotions they had been discussing.

Emotional regulation

What strategies did you learn to help manage tricky emotions?

While we acknowledge emotions can affect they way we behaviour, it was important for pupils to understand they would have to face the consequences of those behaviours. Just like Riley does in the film when she gets cross and verbally erupts, our actions will always have reactions. This is why it is important to have different strategies to support you and stop you from having to deal with any negative reactions.

Five Finger Breathing

Holding your hand open in front of you draw around each finger. While you are drawing up the finger breath in, while you are going down the finger breath out. This helps to calm any irrational reactions and think before you act or say something.

HALT

It is important to understand the importance of this so you can ask yourself; are one of these 4 things is happening. Am I Hungry? Am I Angry? Am I Lonely? Am I Tired? Ig the answer is yes to any of those- this is where you could employ a strategy to resolve this and ease your emotional stress.

You can count on me like 1,2,3…

During lock down the children got to know the Bruno Mars song: You can count on me.

This has been a very fun half term learning lots of new songs to support our emotional literacy. Pupils have enjoyed our singing assemblies even more since Mr Murcutt showed up playing his ukulele. The children are mesmerised watching him.The first song most of us knew from the recent hit ‘Encanto’. Surface pressure describes what it is like to bottle up emotions and identifying what emotions she is feeling. It becomes very clear when she stops emotions.

Well done to all our pupils for contributing to well to our singing assemblies and to such wonderful and thoughtful conversations about what our emotions are, how they affect us and what we can do to manage the,.

Remember ‘ you can count on me like 1,2,3 and I’ll be there.’