Students at a Northampton school have been making ‘calm down boxes’ and learning about ‘useful and unhelpful’ worries with assistance from the St Andrew’s LightBulb team.

Teacher Peter Rainford oversaw the sessions at Castle Academy as part of its Children’s Mental Health Awareness Week activities.

A series of LightBulb workshops took place throughout the day on Thursday for Year 6 pupils, who got take part in breathing exercises, healthy habit sessions and learnt about careers and different types of success.

The calm boxes were especially popular with the children as they were each given one and told to decorate them and put sensory items inside which might help to calm them down at certain times.

The students also got the chance to learn about how to regulate their arousal levels in sensory circuits so they could prepare themselves for the classroom after playtime. This involved taking part in a physical activity session where the children were taught about exercise and how to increase and decrease the heart rate.

Peter said: “The school and students have been wonderfully receptive to LightBulb and it’s wonderful to see the children get so much joy from the sessions we held.

“LightBulb is all about supporting the teachers and their students so the children understand their feelings and how to normalise them. We encourage them to share their feelings and we talk to them about what stress and anxiety might feel like.”

Head of School Daniel Lugg said: “As a school we’ve always taken the mental health of our students extremely seriously and we already had a number of initiatives in place before we started working with LightBulb.

“What the programme has done, has reaffirmed that we were doing all the right things, while also introducing some other new approaches which have really helped us to engage in new ways with our children.

“We’re hugely grateful to the LightBulb team for spending the day with us and helping to engage with the brilliant minds of our students.”

For more information on LightBulb, click here.