Throughout the past month, Makin’ It Happen team members, Kayt, Janelle, Ashley, and Kay collaborated with The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention to educate Manchester School District’s 4th Graders in Gizmo’s Pawesome Guide to Mental Health! They were able to train over 800 students in vital awareness and techniques to assess their mental health.
Gizmo’s Pawesome Guide To Mental Health was a book created about a therapy dog named Gizmo from Connecticut that teaches that mental health is your, “feelings, thoughts, and actions”! Throughout the book, students are able to participate and identify activities they can do to manage their mental health alone and with others. In addition, they identify who are their trusted adults that they can go to when they feel “sad, mad, or worried,” and techniques they can do to prepare if they feel nervous having a conversation with their trusted person. At the end of the training, students engage in two mindfulness exercises to practice breathing and focus using sound and a breathing ball. After, students are asked to utilize the knowledge they learned in the training to curate their very own mental health plan, or as otherwise described, “their mental health cheeseburger,” in which they select options that work best for them when they feel, “sad, mad, or worried”.
This training was conducted in two formats depending on which worked best for each school: an assembly or in individual classrooms. For assemblies, students were able to interact with a therapy dog and learn about each dog’s personality and skills!
We are grateful to each school’s administrators, teachers, and students for making this training possible. We also extend a huge thank you to our training counterparts, AFSP’s Val and Sham, as well as Manchester Schools District’s Director of Comprehensive School Counseling, Joyce Lewis for coordinating these sessions. Last but not least, thank you to each therapy dog and handler for adding immense joy and laughter to our assemblies!
For more training opportunities, be sure to visit our Resiliency Essentials page on our website, as well as https://afsp.org/chapter/new-hampshire for information!
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