Mental Health and Wellbeing
At Oakwood Junior School, we are dedicated to supporting all our children and their families. We believe in promoting positive mental health and emotional wellbeing to ensure that the school is a community where everyone feels able to thrive. Our school ethos and values underpin everything that we do.
This page will be used to supply information and resources as well as keep you up to date with what we have been doing at Oakwood to promote positive mental health and wellbeing.
What's been happening at Oakwood this term?
Anti-Bullying Week 11th - 15th November
The theme for anti-bullying week 2024 was Choose Respect. Our assemblies during the week were all about respect - defining it and learning how to be respectful in all situations. On Tuesday, we came to school wearing Odd Socks! A bit bizarre you might be thinking but actually Odd Sock Day is celebrated across the country to celebrate what makes us unique and that everyone is different and this is a good thing! We boogied to Andy and the Odd Sock's new anti-bullying song and took pictures to show off our odd sock creations! Check out the video for Andy's song here and dance along to his very important message!
World Mental Health Day 10th October 2024
World Mental Health Day is celebrated every year on 10th October. The day is about coming together to talk about mental health and show everyone that mental health matters. Talking about our mental health can help us cope better with life's ups and downs.
On World Mental Health Day, we first focused on what mental health is by watching and discussing the 'Talking Mental Health' animation (see link below).
Then we watched a short clip made by the doodle boy, who showed us how doodling can help with mental health. In our classes, we had a go at creating our own doodles and enjoyed chatting with our peers, which helped to promote positive mental health. In the afternoon, we mixed with other classes in the school to create large doodle pieces in the hall. It was lovely to have the chance to be with our friends, meet new people and enjoy drawing and sharing our doodles.
Readathon October 2024
Reading for pleasure changes lives
Children and young people who read for pleasure are more likely to do well at school, have better jobs, be happy and lead fulfilled lives. All through the magic of a humble book or story!
This week, we have all taken part in Readathon 2024! This is a charity that promotes reading for pleasure to improve mental health and wellbeing and raises money to purchase books for children in hospital. Click the links below to find out what we have been doing!
Our Readathon started on the Monday 30th September and ended on Sunday 6th October. Before this week, the Year 6s came together to discuss ideas and activities we could do in school to motivate people to read. They came up with many possible activities, which we then put into a timetable for a week of fun for everyone to participate in. These activities included an author talk, drop everything and read sessions, treasure hunts, lunchtime book club, buddy reading, a reading river, a world record attempt and much more! All of this culminated on Friday with our bedtime story day, which greatly boosted reading for pleasure!
Mrs Stone set the school a target of 50,000 minutes to read in the Readathon week. Everyone was given their own username and password for the track my read app and pupils were encouraged to log all the minutes they read in school and at home. Mrs Stone soon realized she had greatly underestimated our love of reading when, by day three, we had smashed the target with a total of 61,450 minutes read! So, the challenge was set – 100,000 minutes was the new target. Was it possible? Could we motivate ourselves to read and track that many minutes?
Of course we could! We ended up with a grand total of 131,235 minutes logged! What a tremendous achievement by everyone!