Grade 4 students at JD Hogarth Public School participated in a unique mental wellness workshop earlier this month.
On June 5, the students in Carly McFarlane’s Grade 11 girls’ physical education class at Centre Wellington District High School taught 96 Grade 4 students mental wellness strategies.
The Grade 4s were broken up into five different groups and the Grade 11 girls led each station, equipping the elementary students with various ways to handle stressful situations.
The stations included a brain food bar, physical activity, calming crafts, bracelet/key chain making and the decoration of “mental wellness toolkits” where students could store the items they made throughout the day.
The high school students, along with McFarlane, spent the semester working up to the mental wellness day.
“We started talking about things that stress us out and make us angry and we started researching stress management techniques,” McFarlane said.
In March McFarlane said she heard about the Dare to Dream program through the Ontario Centre of Excellence for Child and Youth Mental Health, which was offering $5,000 for youth-led mental wellness initiatives.
Because her Grade 11 class focuses on mental health and addictive behaviours, McFarlane thought the grant was perfect for her students.
“I thought what an amazing way to pull it together if they could actually have that experiential education piece of doing it,” she said.
After brainstorming, working together and testing out some strategies, the Grade 11 class came up with the five different mental wellness stations.
“I just thought I wanted them to be comfortable talking with each other and that kind of thing,” said Grade 11 student Emma Starratt.
“I think it’s beneficial for kids to learn … that everybody’s kind of going through the same thing and they need to be more accepting of each other and talk about it.”
Though there was a threat of rain on June 5, the CWDHS students adapted and ran the stations inside rather than outside as planned.
“It ran really smoothly and the kids were super cooperative and eager to do the things that we had set out for them,” said Grade 11 student Jadyn Janssen.
To begin the day the students held an assembly.
“We did a flash mob to raise their spirits, make them happy,” Haley Caudle explained.
The physical activity station, through the completion of an obstacle course, taught students the importance of team building and bringing team members up, not putting them down, explained Janssen.
The creation of bracelets was the focus of another station.
“We had the different emotions to represent each colour and then we also gave them the freedom to make a memory for this particular colour or something like that,” said Jenna Tofflemire.
“So like the bracelet is supposed to represent … how every emotion is important and it makes (them) who they are.”
Starratt ran the station where students made tool boxes to store all of their coping strategies.
“We also kind of wanted an art part … and we decided a toolbox they could come back to it whenever they wanted to,” she said.
“We wanted them to paint things that made them happy or how they were feeling … So a lot of kids were doing the Sports that they played or their animals or any kind of things like that, which was really cute.”
At another station students made personalized stress balls and calming jars. The last station was the brain food bar which promoted having a healthy body.
“Eating good and exercising and all that kind of stuff definitely improves your mental health and we wanted them to know that too,” Starratt said.
McFarlane still doesn’t know if the school received the Dare to Dream grant but the CWDHS physical education department funded this year’s $1,200 program.
Due to that price tag and the volume of work for her and her students, McFarlane is unsure if the initiative will continue for a second year.
“I hope that I would have the same sort of students in my course that would be intrinsically motivated to do something like this,” McFarlane said.
She added, “They’re warm girls, they’re able to see beyond themselves … I was very proud of them.”
