Y5 have been working on building in a wellbeing session every Wednesday morning. We started off with discussions about wellbeing and prompting the students to think about gratitude, to take a moment to give a compliment to another person in our community and other activities to foreground wellbeing in their daily experience. Since then, we’ve moved to what what call Wellbeing Wednesday activities.

We asked the students to brainstorm the ways they wanted to feel when they are at school, the things they do which make them feel that way and ideas they had for what we could do regularly to help them develop their sense of wellbeing. We’ve been running the activities for a few weeks and the students can move between classes as they choose to take part in different activities which are designed to develop and strengthen the social bonds in our year group. The feedback has been very positive so far and we can see the students building new friendships and growing their social skills.

We also ask the students to do a Wellbeing Check-in Google survey every fortnight and from that, we can monitor their stress levels and they can let us know about things which are affecting their wellbeing in a confidential and safe manner. We’ve been able to see that students who have felt isolated or unable to make friends have grown in confidence and are reporting a greater degree of happiness and lower levels of stress since we began this routine.