How it works
The assembly has eleven slides. It explains what the day is and this year’s theme, shows what good listening looks like, and tells students where to go for help if anything in the week upsets or worries them. It ends by launching the week. The launch slides for both options are included, so show the pair that matches the option you chose and hide the other pair.
This option runs a different lunchtime activity each day: Tea and Talk, Laps at Lunch, the Quiet Room, Ask Me Anything and Green Ribbons. It needs a member of staff at each lunchtime and a small amount of shopping, and it gets far more students involved.
For this option, you put up a blank wall with a stack of cards and a pot of pens, and leave it there all week. Students write the thing they would want somebody to say to them on a bad day and pin it up unsigned. A member of staff reads what has gone up at the end of each day, and the wall stays up after Friday.
The lesson is eighteen slides on what to say when a friend tells you they are struggling. In the middle of the lesson, students get on their feet and rewrite eight things people really said. Nobody is asked about their own week.
A week about mental health can bring back difficult feelings for some students, and some of them may come to you to talk about something that is worrying them. Tell your safeguarding lead about the week before the assembly, and fill in the named member of staff and the reporting route on slide 10 before you show it. If a student does come to you, anything that is a safeguarding concern still goes to your safeguarding lead the same day, and The Quiet Word is a short guide to the conversation itself.
Here are the five lunchtimes, day by day. Each one is based on a different one of the Five Ways to Wellbeing, and none of them depends on the day before, so the week still works if one of them falls through.
Tea and Talk
Tea, squash and biscuits, with conversation cards on the tables.
Laps at Lunch
A lap of the field or the yard, tallied on a board all week.
The Quiet Room
One room stays open with jigsaws, colouring and board games, and nobody has to talk.
Ask Me Anything
Questions go in a box on Monday. The answers go up on Thursday.
Green Ribbons
Students write something good about somebody on a tag and tie it up.
A look inside
Get the week
Page one of the pack is the whole thing on one page: which option to pick, and what you have to do in each of the three weeks before it. After that there is a block for each option, and the last four pages are the lesson, with the hour set against the slide numbers.
The assembly slides
Eleven slides for the Friday before, with the launch slides for both options and one on where students can go for help if anything in the week has upset or worried them.
Download PowerPointThe PSHE lesson slides
Eighteen slides: students sort eight replies, learn four things that help, then stand up and rewrite eight real replies.
Download Printable PDFTeacher resource pack
Ten pages. Page one is what to do and when, then a block for each option, the lesson hour, and everything that needs printing.
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