Emotional skills, friendship and wellbeing

At Pilgrims, we understand the importance of children’s mental health and take great care to encourage our pupils to share and talk about their feelings.

Learning the tools to promote your emotional wellbeing is vital, and the younger you can learn these skills the better.

This month, Pilgrims celebrated Children’s Mental Health Week, which this year focused on the importance of ‘belonging’ to our wellbeing.

Here, Jacqueliine Morales, our Additional Needs and Wellbeing Lead, looks at children’s mental health and how the school goes above and beyond to support our pupils’ wellbeing.

Expressing how they feel

Our children are encouraged from a young age to express their emotions and learn ways to manage their feelings – it’s something I am very passionate about.

There have been some alarming statistics produced by the NHS that show that one in five children aged 8-16 have a probable mental disorder, so equipping children with life-long skills they can use to understand their emotions, and process how they are feeling in a constructive way, is so important.

It’s about being proactive so we don’t need to be reactive later down the line.

We teach our children three things – emotional resilience, emotional literacy and  emotional intelligence.  By teaching them these three things, and the vocabulary to talk about their mental health and emotions, we equip them with the tools to handle their feelings long into the future.

Belonging

Children have a desire to belong – being part of a family, a friendship group, a school class or a club, for example.It’s something we encourage at Pilgrims, that sense of belonging.

For our very young children, this could be bringing in items from home to help them settle in. It could be a comforter, or a photo of their family, something that makes them feel at home wherever they are.

It’s all about creating a strong partnership between our families and the school, so children feel they belong and know there are people always there who will listen and support them.

Kipsy the Caring Caterpillar

Over the years, we have worked closely with charity Making Me, using its brilliant Kipsy the Caring Caterpillar programme.

This includes a number of ways to engage children with their mental health, including our Kipsy Caterpillar club and our feelings flowers.

The Caterpillar Club is a fortnightly session where a story related to an emotion is read aloud to the children in a circle.

Each session, we say to the children: “Feelings are just feelings, they come and they go. We don’t have to be afraid of our feelings, we just have to know what they are and use our words to talk about them with someone we can trust.”

The idea is to normalise talking about our emotions and to promote feeling comfortable sharing our feelings.

At the end of each session we have something called calm time, where the children practice breathing techniques to calm their minds.

We like to tell them they are like a snowglobe shaken up, and that sometimes for learning we need to let ourselves settle and have a calm mind.

Feelings Flower

As part of the Making Me programme, one of the first things pupils do when they come into class every morning is put their feelings flowers on the wall.

A flower is placed on how they are feeling at that moment – happy, sad, angry, worried or ok.

It’s a useful way for our teachers to know how each child is feeling that day, and gets the children into the habit of sharing their emotions.

The children can change their flower placement at any time during the day, and are encouraged to speak to a trusted adult, or our Talk Time champions,  if they are worried or angry about anything.

Talk Time Champions

Our Talk Time champions are key to helping our children express their emotions and works alongside our feelings flowers and Caterpillar Club programmes.

At Pilgrims, we have five dedicated Talk Time Champions – whose job is simply to listen.

They are there to give the children the time and space to talk, and the children can find them by the caterpillar sticker on their lanyard. The children are encouraged to speak to them about anything.  

It could be they are just excited because it’s their mum’s birthday, but it could be something that’s playing on their mind, like their grandmother has been unwell.

Our Talk Time champions give the children an outlet for their feelings, a trusted adult they can share their emotions with.

We also run a Nurture Club for years 1 and 2. 

It’s a group session for a maximum of six children, a safe space where they can talk about feelings in more depth. 

Children can often feel more comfortable and at ease at the Nurture Club and find it easier to contribute and express their feelings in greater detail.

Children’s mental health is thankfully being taken more seriously now, particularly from an early age, and it’s something in which Pilgrims are leading the way.