At St Augustine’s, we are committed to supporting the emotional health and wellbeing of our pupils, their families and our staff.
We know that everyone experiences life challenges that can make us vulnerable and at times, anyone may need additional emotional support. We take the view that positive mental health is everybody’s business and that we all have a role to play.
Our friends from Burton Albion Golden Goals Club came into school today and joined us for our wellbeing walk around the village. The children had a lovely time chatting to everyone on the walk and served our guests tea and delicious cakes when we arrived back to school. The weather was perfect and we thoroughly enjoyed being out in the fresh air!
“On behalf of the Draycott and Burton area members of the Burton Albion Community Trust Golden Goals Club, I would like to thank the staff and children of St Augustine’s Academy for treating us to such delicious refreshments when we returned from our walk around the village on Friday 25th November. The children joined us on our walk and I’m sure they enjoyed it as much as we did! They were excellent at waiting on the tables and so polite. Thank you so much, we cannot wait to do it again!”
Ruth Adams.
In Class 2 we cut out pictures and sorted them into what was and wasn’t good for our mental health. Fabulous work Class 2!!
Friday 5th February we are holding a Zoom worship with the theme dress to express yourself. Both children at home and school will be encouraged to dress to express themselves in whatever they choose to support children’s mental health week.
This week during our weekly Relax kids sessions we spent the time thinking about being calm and being inspired by the story ‘The Dot’ by Peter H. Reynolds. We gave each other spiral massages, danced to ‘Can’t Stop the Feeling’ and created out own artwork, all starting with a simple dot.
This afternoon, after our PE session with Port Vale, we had the opportunity to be mindful for a half an hour! We could choose from some mindful craft activities and some of the children decided to finish their dot artwork from this morning.
Finally, we relaxed with a yoga session using Cosmic Kids Yoga on YouTube!
To celebrate Children’s Mental Health Week in Class 1, we explored lots of different emotions. Making ‘happy buckets’, we decorated our buckets with lots of lovely things and filled them with what makes us happy and ways we can makes others happy too (as that is just as important)!
We also read the story, ‘Ruby’s Worry’-a story about a girl called Ruby who finds a worry. Her worry keeps on getting bigger and bigger, following her around everywhere, until she comes across a friend who also has a worry. They share their worries and find that they get smaller and smaller when they tell someone about them. We discussed our own worries and thought about what our worries would look like. Look at our wonderful ‘Worry Dolls’ we made just in case we ever need to share a worry like Ruby!
For those of you who couldn’t tune in to the Teams meeting this morning, I wanted to give you details about my Headteacher Challenge! I have been reading the BFG at home with my girls and got to the chapter about dream jars and thought how lovely it would be if we could all each create a Hopes and Wishes jar for 2021. I’d like the children to decorate the jar with lots of wonderful things and then reach out to friends and family to ask them all for a hope or wish for the year. I know we can’t see people at the moment and this is the challenge, so you could call someone, send a message on a phone, facetime or set up a virtual meeting…. Any way you’d like to.
The BFG said:
“The dreams is always invisible until they is captured. After that they is losing a little of their invisibility.”
By capturing our loved ones hopes and dreams, over the year we will hopefully see them all clearly.
The jars can either be bought into school when you drop work off or, on the 11th February, I will be setting up another Teams meeting for you to share these with your friends and me in school.
Good luck everyone and enjoy!!!
Mrs Walker x
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(Click on some of the images below to find more child friendly, fun sites to visit!)
Supporting your children's remote education during coronavirus (COVID-19) - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)
Places you can find help with your mental health:
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SUAT supports and leads in the set-up of new academies joining the partnership. The services provided by the central support function cover both educational and non-educational support. In terms of educational support, SUAT is linked to the School of Education of Staffordshire University, which is an outstanding ITT provider.
