While learning at home some children may be experiencing a need to manage strong emotions. This is not surprising;  their usual day to day school life and relationships with friends have been disrupted.  Children may also be struggling to recognise the emotions and perspective of others at home in a busy family life. 

 

On our recent home learning survey around two-thirds of children felt that they needed more support from teachers with emotional regulation (123 responses in total).

This week our teachers will be reminding the children of all the strategies they have used to calm their amygdala during their MindUP lessons in school. Each teacher will post a video of a 'Brain-break' for the children to use. Find out more about our MIndUP curriculum here.

 

Next week the charity Place2Be will be focusing on children's mental health. In school and through remote learning will will be helping children focus in on their own mental health and wellbeing. Teachers will be using some of their feedback sessions and assembly times to talk to children about strategies they can use if they are feeling overwhelmed. They may also have some learning planned linked to this. This will mean they might have less things to do for other lessons while we focus on mental wellbeing.

 

On Place2Be's childrensmentalhealthweek.org.uk website there are also resources that you can use with your child at home; including activity ideas and an online assembly which will be available from Monday 1 February. 

 

There are many ways that you as parents can help your child recognise and describe emotions and how they influence their thoughts and behaviour, here are just two examples you might like to try:

• starting a daily ‘emotional check-in’: graphing feelings, choosing an emoji to match mood, writing in a diary with prompts. Here is a link to a Feelings Tracker you might find useful;
• using sentence starters to promote discussion such as ‘The coronavirus period has made me feel ...’, ‘I am finding it hard to....’, ‘What keeps me going is...’ ’, ‘What I miss most is...’, ‘I am hoping that...’

 

If your child has worries or concerns linked to learning at home, they can add their worries to our virtual worrybox at worrybox@fielding.ealing.sch.uk. 

If you need any further support in supporting your child's emotions at home, you can contact Mrs Reehal our Learning Mentor at admin@fielding.ealing.sch.uk