Mrs Dempsey is an ELSA (Emotional Literacy Support Assistant) is the Pupil Mental Health and Wellbeing Lead at Hucknall Flying High Academy. 

We believe maintaining and enhancing the wellbeing of all pupils is a key factor to ensuring children are able to flourish and reach their full potential.

ELSA is an initiative developed and supported by educational psychologists, who apply their professional knowledge of children’s social and emotional development to areas of need experienced by pupils. They provide on-going professional supervision to help maintain high quality in the work undertaken by ELSAs, thereby helping to ensure safe practice for ELSAs and pupils alike.

What does wellbeing mean?

Wellbeing refers to the quality of people's lives. At school that means all adults work hard to make sure children feel happy, safe, healthy and comfortable in their environment. This can be achieved by following five simple steps.

Connect

At the moment it is hard to stay connected to everyone but there are ways to reach out to people.  On your daily exercise can you spot the rainbows in the windows of people in your neighbourhood?  Can you write a note on the floor in chalk to your friends outside their house?  It's important to keep in touch by phone or video call (if possible) with the rest of your family and friends.  Perhaps write a card, postcard or letter to keep lines of communication open.  We still have to keep a safe distance from people but we can smile, wave and say hello to people.  

Some of the ways we achieve this at school :

• Having Greeters at the school gates to welcome the children in with a smile and check how they are in the morning.
•  There are adults that are available to listen, who care and understand the importance of knowing children well.
•  Fostering an atmosphere that is welcoming, friendly where children feel safe to say how they are feeling.

Be Active

When you exercise your body releases endorphins that make you feel good.  So do as much as you can.  Again, although harder at the moment make sure you get out in the garden or go for a walk,run, jog or bike ride keeping safe by social distancing.  

Ways we do this at school:

• Next Level Sports run most of our P.E. lessons.   These are trained coaches who specialise in providing sessions that teach the children different sports and skills.
• At playtime we have all sorts of equipment for the children to play with including bats, balls and basket ball hoops.
• Our playground floor has many different games to enhance the children's play, encouraging them to run, skip, throw and jump.
• Enjoy yoga sessions.
• Have dance classes after school.

Yoga and Mindfulness

Striver have made all of their yoga and mindfulness resources free to download for parents during these times of closure. It is more important than ever to look after our mental health. Below, there are snippets from the resources for each year group. These are designed for absolutely everyone, from the yoga beginner to the yoga pro! 

You can follow the link if you would like to download all of the resources yourselves.

Take Notice

Being mindful helps you get the most out of every day and every situation.  If we notice things around us and take the time to listen, feel, taste, smell and enjoy things fully we appreciate them more.  Most of us have more time now to slow down and find the positives of just about everything.  

In school we:

• Learn the skills to become more mindful.
• Encourage children to think about how other's are feeling developing skills working in teams.
• Have spaces in the school for children to calm down.
• Are given specific times to talk about their emotions and recognise how they are feeling.

Give

There are many different things we can give to each other :time, thoughts, a listening ear, compliments.  Our school has a wonderful, warm atmosphere where children are encouraged to think of others.  

Some of the ways we do this in school:

• Celebrating accomplishments,
• Fundraising for charities,
• Donating food to food banks.

Keep Learning

We love it when the children come and share the different things they have been doing out of school and we think it's very important to expose the children to a wide range of experiences to enrich their lives.

At school we:

• Set the children new challenges,
•  Learn to play instruments an new languages,
• Support outside interests.