Over the last month, AAW has been focusing on the mental health of our young people and promoting different ways our group can begin to take care of themselves better!
This semester, we have started incorporating mental health days once a month. On those days, we want to provide activities that will allow everyone to take a break from the busyness and stress of their day-to-day lives and participate in some relaxing and fun things they may not do often!
We also dedicated one of our small group nights to writing the negative things we think about ourselves along with stresses, fears, insecurities, pressures, etc. on plates then took them outside to destroy them as a symbol of letting go of all the negative things that hold us back!
The last thing we did for mental health month was drawing pictures of ourselves and listing all the things we hear, speak, & do with our bodies that impact our lives on a daily basis. The purpose of this was to make us more conscious of the things that we allow into our hearts, minds, and bodies that may have a positive or negative impact on us.
Here is our mental health day! We had people painting, coloring, playing checkers and chess, and sudoku. It was so fun to just take a break from everything and do things we normally do not get to do. The kids had fun doing this are excited to make this a regular thing!
Here is the “letting go” plate challenge that we did together. This day was deep, but it was very much needed. The kids needed that time to get the difficult things they deal with out and to express the negative thoughts that consume them. They were also able to see the things that they think about themselves are not different from their peers. It was important to point out that the majority of the things they wrote are just simply not true!
Check out this video of our group destroying the plates filled with negativity!
Here we are drawing pictures of ourselves. Some of our drawings were better than others, but the point of this activity was to point out what we do in our lives and how we can make them more beneficial to our well-being. I truly believed that it worked and we can begin to work on the things we need to do!