Wellness Week
Tool kit
‘Wellness Week’ is an initiative run by Little Ones Wellness, supported by the Ministry of Health. Wellness Week is an annual school project that is part of the curriculum in primary schools across New Zealand. Wellness Week supports children ages 7-8 (years 3-4) in gaining a deeper understanding of the emotions they experience as well as providing an educational moment for them to learn how to deal with what they’re feeling. It provides primary schools with access to mindful activities and resources to encourage the children to learn more about their health and wellness. We hope that by providing this experience, we can equip these children with the skills to harness their emotions and in return tackle the challenging statistic that 50% of mental illnesses start before the age of 12.
Characters
We created these three characters or ‘monsters’ for the children to follow as a guide though the program. They provide a bit of fun in the process and are though all aspects of the program. Creating a character that the children can copy and use as a guide though the program reduces the formality of the pack and creates a kid friendly tone.
Wellness Workbook
The Wellness Handbook is a printed spiral bound workbook that will be given out to all children in years 3 and 4 at primary schools across New Zealand. The book contains educational pages for the students to learn more about what emotions they are feeling and how to express them in healthy ways. The book contains fun activities which also act as educational tid bits, parent/caregiver information pages and weekly reflections that students are to complete in class. The weekly reflections are a key element of the Handbook, as it is getting the students to communicate a new understanding of their emotions. Each weekly reflection spread links to one of the activity cards, they will complete these reflections in class as part of their school curriculum and will receive stamps from the teacher to indicate completed reflections. Once all reflections have been completed, the children then have the opportunity to get the branded Wellness Week patches to adorn their school bags.
Activity App
We created the Little Ones Wellness App to go hand in hand with the Mindfulness cards and the Wellness Handbook. The app is a simple design that links with all design elements in the other touchpoints. The app features a digitised version of the Mindfulness cards, making it fast and easy for the children to catch up on their mindful activities on their home devices. It also features a live feed of uploads that the students are encouraged to upload after completing their tasks. Featuring fun elements like choosing your own avatar and adding stickers of your chosen avatar to your uploads. As technology becomes more and more advanced, children are spending more time staring into screens than spending time connecting with other people and their surrounding environment, so we wanted the app to support the learning from the Wellness Handbook and Mindfulness cards and not take centre stage.