The Children’s Mental Health Week Resource Pack, adapted from The Feelings Artbook by Ruby Radburn and published by Routledge, is a valuable tool for supporting children’s emotional wellbeing. This pack features a variety of creative and engaging activities to help children understand their emotions, express feelings in a healthy way, and develop effective strategies for managing stress, anxiety, anger, and other challenging emotions.
The activities encourage self-reflection and creativity, helping children explore their inner experiences while learning practical techniques to handle difficult situations. Designed for use by teachers, parents, and mental health professionals, the pack is an excellent resource for promoting emotional literacy and building resilience.
What’s Inside the Resource Pack?
- Exploring Emotions: Children are guided to identify their feelings and express them visually or verbally. Activities include creating “emotion faces” and experimenting with colours and shapes to represent emotions.
- Understanding Anger: Exercises such as drawing a “body map” show how anger feels physically (e.g., clenched fists, tense muscles) and teach techniques like deep breathing or counting to calm down.
- Managing Anxiety: Interactive tasks help children identify sources of worry and explore calming activities such as creating spider diagrams, practising breathing exercises, and discussing coping strategies.
- Addressing Sadness and Embarrassment: Activities encourage children to share what makes them feel sad or embarrassed and brainstorm ways to handle these emotions. Discussions focus on self-acceptance and seeking support.
- Art and Creativity: The pack includes prompts for creating abstract art to represent emotions, encouraging children to use their imagination and develop a deeper understanding of their feelings.
This resource pack is ideal for classroom settings, one-on-one counselling sessions, and home use. By providing fun and engaging ways to explore emotions, it helps children build essential skills for emotional regulation, self-expression, and coping with life’s challenges.
Perfect for Children’s Mental Health Week or any time of the year, this pack is an invaluable tool for fostering emotional wellbeing and resilience in children.
