Plant a Tulip and Seed the Conversation – Mental Health Awareness Week
For this year’s Mental Health Awareness Week (May 10-16th 2021), our Year 9 Wellbeing Reps gave a fantastic assembly combining excellent advice and their own initiatives. The Year 9s (Evie B, Hope G, Matilda J, Sophia M, Avneet S, Rosa S-S, Anjali K, Eliza H, Annabel B, Adeline M-S) kicked off by talking about the main aims of the national campaign around the five ways to wellbeing which are key to help maintaining good mental health.
Connect – Social Connectedness
Social connectedness has huge benefits on mental health, including having a sense of belonging or community so people can be their true selves. Being part of that community also means that you can call on someone to support you and talk to you when you are feeling down. And, of course within that community being able to give that support back to others too. Helping others will help you feel better too.
Be Active – Physical Activity
Taking time out of your day to do things that can improve your wellbeing can help you with maintaining good mental health, even if it’s just taking a minute each day to sit and focus on your breathing to centre yourself or going outside to do you work instead of being inside.
Take Notice – Awareness
Being present and taking notice of the world around us can be something that we do during our everyday life. The key to taking notice is to be aware of what you’re doing, and trying to engage with it. Unlike, for example being active, taking notice is much more of a mental activity.
- Walk around your neighbourhood.
(You are not merely trying to get from A to B. You are walking ‘on purpose’.) - Try to see things with ‘new eyes’.
- Look for beauty in the unexpected: look out for colours, textures, shapes, reflections in water, shadows. Look down, look up, and look along.
- Get creative and take pictures with a camera! Focus on capturing what’s before you.
- Use the images to make a collage, screensaver, or postcards.
Keep Learning – Educating
Challenge yourself by trying new things – why not try out a new musical instrument, read, listen more or learn a new skill or take up a new hobby.
Giving – Helping and Giving
Giving is the act of freely parting with something and offering it to someone or something beyond ourselves- a stranger, friend, family member, a charitable organisation, our local community or our wider community. It can involve parting with material things like money and gifts, or immaterial things like our time, skills,
knowledge, enthusiasm, passion and kindness.
In practice, giving can look like a number of things – it could mean supporting a friend with a problem, donating clothes or unused items to a charity, volunteering your time for a cause you care about, or simply making an effort to make more time for the people that you care about.
With “Connect to Nature” as the theme for Mental Health Awareness Week this year, our Wellbeing Reps came up with the wonderful idea of “planting a tulip and seeding the conversation.” A tulip is an emblem of hope, brightness and know for 
having a colourful past, flourishing brightly against all odds. So, students made origami tulips in formtime to give to a friend or family member, together with a lovely message explaining why they were giving it to them. It could be something as small as someone helping you with some work or being able to always make you smile of which you can show your appreciation for them.
Continuing the nature theme, the Year 9 Wellbeing team also decided to run an ‘Anonymous Tulip Seeds Delivery Service’ this year for the whole school to raise money for ‘Mind’. Mind raises awareness for mental health and supports young people with mental health issues. Students nominated someone to receive a Tulip seeds package and message with the packages being sent out the following week.
The Wellbeing Reps ended their assembly with a list of useful mental health websites, including:
Stem4 Supporting Teenage Mental Health
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