1st – 7th of February is Children’s Mental Health Week and this year the theme is…
‘Express yourself’
Expressing yourself is about finding ways to share feelings, thoughts, or ideas, through creativity. It is about finding a way to show who you are, and how you see the world, that can help you feel good about yourself.
Here are our favourite ways you can join in with Children’s Mental Health Week, at home, with 7 activities for expressing yourself!
- Splatter Painting – It might be best to do this one outside… you can use paper, fabric, newspaper, cardboard boxes – anything! Put your chosen canvas somewhere appropriate, get your paint brushes and paint and start splattering! This is lots of fun and something everyone can get involved in…as long as you don’t mind a bit of paint!
- Slime – 1 cup of cornflour , 1/2 cup of hand soap, 3 or 4 tablespoons of oil. You can add food colouring, glitter, polystyrene balls, rice – anything! Make your slime your own!
- Draw your feelings – Teaching our children that talking about how they feel is really important and this is a great way of doing that. For this activity find a piece of plain paper, some pens or pencils and then simply draw and talk. Listen and acknowledge any worries your children have, share some of your own worries too! I don’t think anyone has made it through the past 10 months without feeling more stressed or anxious about things, activities like this will help your child understand that this is normal and that they can talk to you if things seem a bit much sometimes.
- ‘Dress to Express’ – A ‘wear what you like day’ – what better time to do this than when we are all at home anyway??
- Write a song/poem/story – You could perform it, make puppets, or get the instruments out! Even start it at the beginning of the week and add to it every day. This isn’t school work – this isn’t about meeting any criteria other than using imagination so maybe don’t worry about the spellings or punctuation on this. Save that for the home schooling!
- Design a t-shirt – You can either get your tie-dye on with some cheap white t-shirts, fabric dye and elastic bands, or you can get some felt tips and let them go wild designed their own unique piece of clothing! Just be careful if using pens/felt tips as it probably wont wash that well!
- Kitchen Disco! Add your favourite songs to a playlist and dance! However you want to… Your favourite songs will make you feel happy and moving around is a great way to express yourself and get those endorphins pumping!
You can find more ways of supporting your child’s mental health here and more about Children’s Mental Health Week here.