In support of Children's Mental Health Week, 7th February - 13th February, Buckinghamshire Mind’s Children and Young People’s (CYP) Team is delivering school workshops and assemblies, taking inspiration from this year’s theme ‘Growing Together’.
Buckinghamshire Mind is a charity that has been working to support and represent people with mental health problems living across the county for over 100 years.
Sandy Drury, CYP Team Lead at Buckinghamshire Mind said: “Children’s Mental Health Week is a fantastic opportunity to raise awareness, but we would also like to remind the community that Bucks Mind’s CYP team are available to provide support all year round.
She added: “We would love to hear from schools, colleges and youth organisations in Buckinghamshire and East Berkshire, to discuss the ways in which we can help them to support our local children and young people.”
Workshops will use nature around the ‘Growing Together’ theme, such as:
Cultivating Growth
Just as plants need sunlight, water and soil to grow, we need things as humans to grow. Obviously, the physical requirements of food, water and warmth but also the emotional needs that have to be met. Love, self-acceptance, confidence, stability and resilience. In this workshop we consider ways of building resilience and self-confidence, while thinking about our success at overcoming difficult situations.
Celebrating Diversity
The diversity of nature has also helped us to consider how the richness of a diverse community helps to cultivate a healthy outlook on life. We all have specific and unique attributes and qualities that we bring to our communities and, by celebrating these, we can help to build healthy, well-rounded people.
We are able to offer a workshop focusing on diversity and celebrating our differences, and considering what makes each of us unique.
Growing stronger together
We will also consider how we can work through difficult situations and become stronger. By teaching the principles of ‘Growth Mindset’ we can help to overcome the fear of failure and establish the idea that, even if I don’t succeed at first, it’s an opportunity to learn from our mistakes, try again and get better and stronger. We will use this as a chance to reflect on situations that might have been difficult and how we can navigate these times to come through stronger. Writing a letter to our younger self reflecting on a time in our past when we struggled and how we could manage that using tools and strategies we have now learnt, or writing to our future self to advise how to manage situations in the future.
Throughout next week Buckinghamshire Mind will highlight mental health and wellness tips, information and signposting for children and young people on their social media platforms:
www.linkedin.com/company/buckinghamshire-mind
For further information please email: cyp@bucksmind.org.uk or visit: www.bucksmind.org.uk
You can find out more about Children’s Mental Health Week here.