Things to get involved in
SELF CARE
Self-care is all about what you can do to help yourself feel better or to keep yourself feeling good. It’s a way that we can look after our own mental health and wellbeing. Everyone’s approach to self-care will look different. What works for you might not work for others. There are lots of different self-care strategies so you can try out different ones until you find something that works for you. The main thing is to find things you enjoy. Whatever works for you.
Check out over 90 self-care strategies identified and written by young people on https://www.annafreud.org/on-my-mind/self-care/.
Some great graphics from Blessing Manifesting https://www.instagram.com/blessingmanifesting/
PAST EVENTS
22nd – 26th February
To bring wellbeing to the forefront of students’ and staff minds, and for students to be aware of help and support available at Blackpool Sixth.
Monday Motivation
Monday highlighted student motivation and taught students how they can prepare for a day of learning at home, as well as how students can retain social connections during a pandemic.
Thrive Tuesday
Activities/resources around positive emotions and how students are able to recognise positive emotions within themselves.
Wellbeing Wednesday
Principal Jill Gray was interviewed on a podcast on the subject of ‘How to help yourself?’, where she shared stories of how she helps herself and how college can help in enabling students to help themselves.
Thoughtful Thursday
Two mindfulness videos were shared with teaching staff, one around guided meditation and another around a guided yoga session.
Flexible Friday
Students were encouraged to spend 5/10 minutes stretching at some point in the day. Specific set of stretches were shared that focused on counteracting sitting for prolonged periods.
MINDFULNESS CHALLENGES
Sweet challenge
Buy a pack of coloured sweets like the one in the picture.
- For every red one say one thing that makes you happy.
- For every blue one say something that makes you feel sad.
- For every green one say something that makes you motivated.
- For every yellow, one thing that makes you excited.
- For every brown, a good choice you made today.
- For every orange, something you love about yourself.
Tasting Exercise
Taste something with a strong flavour, like coffee or a tangerine and pay close attention to what happens in your mouth, then what feeling these tastes evoke.
Really try and appreciate how the object tastes and how the object makes you feel. Breathe it in deep without thinking of anything other than that object and how it makes you feel.
Try this a couple of times until you have fully understood and appreciated every aspect and emotion of the taste.
CHARITY FUNDRAISING
FUNDRAISING REPORT 2019/20
- Blue Skies £402.74
- Breast Cancer Awareness £6.78
- Christmas Quiz £688.32
- Guide Dogs £549.20
- Jeans for Genes £129.00
- Mental Health Awareness £108.82
- Save The Children £59.44
- Stonewall £106.53
- Trinity Hospice £830.99
- World Environment Day £30.00
- Our Blue Light/Inspired Through Sport £784.19
TOTAL (£ 3,696.01)
Blue Skies Hospitals Fund
Blue Skies Hospitals Fund is the Student Council’s chosen charity for the year.
You can find out more about the charity and donate here.
If you have ideas for fundraising and want to get involved message the Student Council through their Instagram @b6council
CREATIVE WRITING
Expressing your ideas and feelings through writing is well-known to be a great way of boosting your well-being. Whether you write stories, poetry, a diary or a journal or combine your writing with other art-forms like drawing or photography, you will find that it’s a fantastic way of understanding yourself and the world better.
To help you along with this, we are starting a series of prompts to help you kick-start your writing habit in 2021!
‘Hope is the thing with feathers’
The inspiration for this prompt comes from the amazing American poet Emily Dickinson (b.1830, d.1886). Although she only had eight poems published in her lifetime, she is now considered one of the greatest poets in world literature.
Here’s the first verse of one of her best-known poems:
“Hope” is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all –
The poem compares something quite abstract and difficult to grasp – ‘hope’ – and gets us to think of it as a bird singing within us and not giving up.
You can find the rest of the poem here together with links to more of Emily Dickinson’s poems.
Your writing task
Think about an abstract emotion or idea, perhaps a word you hear used a lot in quite an unspecific way e.g. fear, worry, happiness, health, well-being, resilience. How could you picture it as something much more physical or ‘real’ to you e.g. an animal, a landscape, a building, a piece of clothing? Now write (without thinking about it too much) for a few minutes, building up your description. Use the senses – what does it look and sound like and, if it fits – what does it taste, smell or feel like to touch? Then look over your notes and pick out the best bits. Write this up as a short poem or just a paragraph of description. If you are doing it as a poem avoid the trap of thinking it has to rhyme. Emily Dickinson was brilliant at rhyme but these days most poets avoid it as it can feel too forced or contrived.
If you’d like to share your poem or paragraph, please send it to me at jon.mcleod@blackpoolsixth.ac.uk and I’ll do my best to include it now or at a later stage in this section of ‘Thrive’. We might even include the best ones into an e-book or have them read as part of a podcast.
Tip: Get yourself a nice notebook for your writing. Computers and phones are great for re-drafting but there’s nothing like using old-fashioned pen and paper for your initial draft. Label it with the date and maybe something to remind you about how you were feeling when you wrote it.
THE FAB STORY
Some great tips from The Fab Story who you can follow on Instagram @thefabstory
STUDENT ARTWORK
Hollie Coulston – Upper Sixth BTEC triple Art & Design student.
GRATITUDE CHALLENGES
