This afternoon, Lauren from the Mental Health Support Team came to speak to us about how we can use different problem solving techniques to help manage our worries or anxieties.

We began the session by discussing what anxiety actually is. We looked at two different types of worries, including ‘practical’ worries (such as ‘Who am I going to play with at lunch?’ or ‘Am I going to understand the work at school today?’) and ‘What if?’ worries (meaning we can’t always doing anything about them but my talking positively to ourselves and believing in ourselves we can get through them).  We also learnt that anxiety is completely normal and it can actually help us sometimes to perform better in different scenarios.

We then talked through some solutions for practical worries such as ‘talking to a trusted adult’, ‘trying your best’ or ‘talking to a friend’. We then tried our some strategies for managing the ‘What if?’ worries. Some of these included naming an animal for each letter of the alphabet, going on a shape hunt and seeing how many different types of shapes we could see around our classroom and also some breathing techniques. We discussed how we can do these discreetly, without anyone seeing, if we need to. This was a lot of fun!

We then finished off by writing down a worry that we sometimes have, discussing what techniques could help us and who we could talk to about these worries.

Great work Year 3 , you had some brilliant ideas and talked really openly about your ideas for helping each other with  worries you may have.

Have a super weekend everyone!

Miss Hutton 🙂