In the midst of another national lockdown and half way through Children’s Mental Health Week 2021, we want to place focus on mental health awareness for the small heroes who are soldiering on with home schooling in these confusing times. The theme for this year’s Children’s Mental Health Week is ‘Express Yourself’, which their website describes below:
“Expressing yourself is about finding ways to share feelings, thoughts, or ideas, through creativity. This could be through art, music, writing and poetry, dance and drama, photography and film, and doing activities that make you feel good.”
This description could not be closer to the focus that we at Kicks Dance put on every single class. Children can be vulnerable at times and may not always know how to express themselves, whether it’s pure joy and happiness, or frustration and sadness. In every Kicks lesson, we endeavour to create a safe environment for the children to express themselves through the medium of dance.
We all know that putting on our favourite songs and having a good boogie is so important for our mental health and makes us feel good – it is the same for children! Music has an inspiring and uplifting quality that instantly fills us with warmth and this can be seen in the faces of our lovely Kicks children as their smiles get bigger throughout each class.
Some of our children may walk into class with worries or confusing emotions due to an incident in the day, but after a general chat at the start of the session we are ready to get our bodies up and moving and our minds working with some energetic dancing to our favourite songs! Our favourite Kicks warm up, ‘Chocoooolaaate’ gets our heart rates up and always puts smiles on our faces!
Another core component of Kicks is spreading kindness. Whilst this is always important, if the past year has taught us anything, then it is that kindness is more important now than ever and we should all follow in Captain Tom Moore’s footsteps. As part of our sessions, we often take a moment to reflect on how we can be kind by sharing something caring we have done for others or choosing someone else in the class to say something nice about.
We know that it is really important to keep the children at the forefront of everything we do, which is why our motto is ‘Every child is a star, give yours the chance to sparkle’. A child may come into class not feeling very sparkly or confident, but our nurturing and kind teachers are trained to notice this and ensure that every child leaves with a smile on their face and their sparkle restored!
At the end of the day, these little humans are the future and it is important to nurture them and provide them with the skills to be happy in everything they do. We don’t offer exam training at Kicks as we know that this isn’t for everyone. We try and create a safe environment for children to release their worries, spend time with their friends, enjoy their dancing and most importantly, allow them to express themselves.
Over the next month, we will be sharing what makes some of our Kicks children and teachers feel really good on our social media. Help us spread some happiness this month and join us in celebrating
Feel Good FebruYAY!
