October – Mental Health Month

During October, the school hosts and organizes workshops on the topic of the prevention and preservation of children’s mental health on the occasion of the World Mental Health Day, which is celebrated on October 10^th. This year’s slogan of World Mental Health Day is “Mental Health Movement: Let’s Invest in Mental Health”. We have decided to invest more time and energy in achieving and maintaining psycho-physical balance, which is even more important in this time of global crisis.

For a start, in their art classes 7A students created posters showing ideas of what the school can do in order to prevent and improve the mental health of its students. Sports day, more workshops on the topic of mental health awareness, adequate workload of students, longer breaks, are just some of their ideas. We have begun with the realization of these ideas. Moreover, as part of their PHE classes, Grade 6 students had a workshop on psycho-physical balance where we talked about mental health and practiced some of the techniques that can help students to better manage emotions: proper, deep breathing, “grounding technique”, imagination and muscle relaxation. The workshop was held by Danijela Arandjelovic, the PHE teacher, and Sladjana Ristic, our MYP psychologist. In the following period in order to raise awareness about mental health and wellbeing, we will continue with the workshops as part of the subject “Physical and health education”, as well as with other activities and campaigns.