Children's Mental Health Week will take place between 6th and 12th February, raising awareness of the importance of children and adolescent mental health and the difference early support, education and treatment can make in a child's life.
What is Children's Mental Health Week?
Place2Be's Children's Mental Health Week aims to make a difference to the lives of children and young people across the UK by helping children learn about mental health and the steps we can all take to improve the mental wellbeing of our youngest minds. Children's Mental Health Week 2023 will run from 6th to 12th February, encouraging schools, parents and professionals to get involved in fun educational activities around mental health.
What's this year's theme?
This year's theme is 'Let's Connect,' which is all about helping children understand the mental benefits of meaningful connections. Whether it's connections with our family and friends, or with the wider community and even ourselves - connections are a huge part of building resilience and good mental health.
What are we doing?
Here at Be Happy Resources, we are experts in creating fun and educational resources to support your child's mental health. Our unique resource centre holds over 500 downloadable activities to boost confidence, develop resilience, ease worries and more. For Children's Mental Health Week, we have created some free, downloadable worksheets and activities for your school, workplace or home all around this year's theme. We've also decided to make a small selection of our paid resources free for a short time.
Let's explore some of our free Children's Mental Health Week activities below...
Connect Four
This group activity is all about getting children interacting and connecting with each other by asking questions. This is a great ice breaker activity and can help children explore connections with people they may not usually interact with. Print out a sheet for each member of your group or class, then, have the children mix and ask questions about each other. The first child to fill in their circles with their class mates' names and connect four wins!
Let's Connect - Puzzle Pairs
Another group/class activity that gets your children interacting with each other - this is all about exploring deeper connections and asking fun questions relating to our own lives. Cut out the puzzle pieces and hand out to your group or class. Task the children to find their matching puzzle pieces and ask their partner the questions. They can then swap the puzzle piece with someone else and start again, you can do this as many times as you wish!
Mental Health Conversation Cards
We know how difficult it can be to ask questions about mental health and know what kind of questions to ask our children that allows them to open up. Our Mental Health Conversation Cards are here to help! Full of fun, engaging and informative open ended questions that encourage discussion about thoughts, feelings and coping tools!
How I Connect With Myself
This year's theme is all about connecting with others - but we feel it's equally important to feel connected with ourselves. Feeling in tune with ourselves can help us to become more mindful and confident. This activity explores ways your children can connect with themselves, giving them some examples and asking them to fill in the circles.
How I Connect With Others
There are many methods and ways we connect with others, can your children think about what connections mean to them and how we connect with others? The beauty of this activity is that it is extremely subjective - each child may view the way they connect differently. From the methods of communication - from text messages to physical conversations, to the ways we connect such as hugging, holding hands etc. - there really are no wrong answers to this worksheet!
Dress to Express
Dress to Express day is a day dedicated to celebrating your little one's unique style and personality! Some schools may hold this day on different days throughout the week. We've come up with some design sheets to help your children design their own outfits for Dress to Express day - choose from a t shirt, hoodie, dress, skirt or trousers.
Design a Mental Health Ribbon
We love the mindfulness that creativity can bring - can your children come up with a ribbon for mental health awareness? What colours and images do they think symbolise mental health? Is there a specific aspect of mental health they'd like everyone to think about? Let imaginations go wild in this activity!
You can download all the above resources by heading over to our FREE RESOURCES section. Here you will also find a selection of Teen resources which will eventually form part of our new Teen section of the Be Happy Hub.
We'll be uploading more free resources throughout the week!
Want more resources like this? Why not sign up to our Hub - from just £1.99 a month you can access over 500 downloadable mental health resources for children age 0-11. View our Pricing Plans here.
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