Over the past two weeks, we have had the pleasure of having Rob and Annabelle from RISE, (Part of the Children’s Society for Mental Health and Wellbeing) in our class.
At the beginning of our first lesson, we started off with a warm up game. The game was called ‘The Sun Shines On’ and if, for example, the children have a cat, that child stays standing up and those who don’t have a cat would sit down. We had to listen to each statement and remember if we had to sit down or stand up. We enjoyed learning more about each other playing this game! We then looked at various emotion pictures and talked to our partners about what emotions we know. The children then linked these emotions to the characters from ‘Inside Out’. The next task involved the children picking a card and acting out the emotion. Their friends in class then had to guess the emotion.
At the beginning of our second lesson, we re-capped on what we learnt previously. Our warm up game involved Rob giving us an instruction. Once Rob told us an instruction to follow, we’d then either ‘go’ or ‘stop’. This game was another where we had to carefully listen and pay attention to instructions given. We then talked about what different emotions some of us have experienced. The children shared their experiences of when they have felt angry and sad. We then discussed as a class what strategies we can do if we ever feel this way. We practiced giving ourselves bear hugs if we feel sad and imagining we had a warm hot chocolate in our hands, breathing in and out as we drank it. The final task involved the children drawing faces of the people they can turn to if they ever feel they need to talk to someone.
