Ensuring mental well-being

Keeping children safe and happy during school closures

We're sharing resources and guidance with you about helping children to cope with the change and uncertainty we all face.

We've brought together advice and tips, and we'll keep adding to this as things develop, so keep an eye out for new posts. 

Our focus right now is on supporting children's mental wellbeing when many are feeling anxious or confused. And there will be strategies that are useful for us all to work into our new 'normal'.

Look after yourself

Good mental health starts with looking after ourselves, so that we can better help others.

Here's some useful advice on how to do this from the charity Mind.

Answering children's questions

For those of you still working in schools, here are some tips on how to talk to children about coronavirus:

Keep it simple - tips from the BBC website.

Kiddle is a useful, safe source of information for children.

Harold's Daily Diary - supporting children's mental health during school closures

Harold is a happy, healthy giraffe and many children will have met him during a visit to the Life Education Lifespace - a special teaching environment where children learn about keeping healthy.

Each day, Harold's diary gets children to think about the different things they need to keep healthy - physically and emotionally. There are ideas for activities, pictures and other resources.

Harold will focus particularly on the NHS Five Ways to Wellbeing and how we all need to look after the 5 different areas of our lives.

These are important for children and adults. Each day Harold records in his diary that different things that he's been doing to stay happy and healthy. 

Here are some thank you posters that you might want to colour in to put in your windows to show our key workers how grateful we are to them! That way they know how caring the pupils at Northern are. If you haven't got a printer you could just copy one of the designs on to a plain piece of paper.