October Coming up

There is so many celebrations coming up! If you want to celebrate any of these days that are coming up this week, click on the link and you will see picture books for the topic and things I have written in the past.

7th October is World Smile Day! This year it was on 2nd October because it is celebrated on the first Friday in October

7th October is World Architecture Day. This year it was on the 5th October because it is celebrated on the first Monday in October.

7th October is Bathtub Day, but Bathtub Party Day is on 5th December.

8th October is World Sight Day observed on the second Thursday in October.

8th October is World Octopus Day which is part of Cephalopod Awareness Week. 5th -9th in 2026 

9th October is Ageism Awareness Day.

9th October is World Egg Day. It is on the 9th this year because it is celebrated on the second Friday in October.

10th October is World Mental Health Day.

10th October is I Love Yarn Day. It is celebrated on the second Saturday in October.

11th October is International Day of the Girl Child and here.

14th October is Ride2Work Day. 2026 theme Cycling for a Greener Future.

As well we are bang smack in the middle of World Space Week (4th - 10th) Here are several ways to celebrate this.

Here 2022 Here 2023 Here 2025

The theme for this year is "Rocket Revolution," which highlights commercial spaceflight, reusable rockets, and startups making space more accessible. The students who use the school library love reading about space and rockets is an oft-requested topic.

29th September World Heart Day

Every year, The World Heart Federation asks monuments around the world to light up red on 29 September to raise awareness of cardiovascular disease, the world’s number one killer.

• All About The Heart  by Remi Kowalski and Tonia Composto

• Words and Your Heart  by Kate Jane Neal

Picture books about the heart come in two types...one, about the heart as a organ of the body and the tasks it performs to keep us alive and two, about how hearts make us feel emotionally. This day was instigated to celebrate the first heart idea as well-operating hearts are extremely important to our health. But, in a school we also talk about hearts and feelings being an important part of our and others' wellbeing. The two books above demonstrate this well.

Others for the pumping heart:

 

Books about the feelings heart:

10th October World Mental Health Day

Make mental health & well-being for all a global priority. 

Every year in October, around the time of World Mental Health day on the 10th, people all over the world celebrate Mental Health Week. Mental Health Awareness Week is held annually in the second week of October. This year, Mental Health Awareness Week 2022 will be held from 10th-16th October.

We know that lockdowns have had an effect on the mental wellbeing of children. In December 2020, research showed that more than four in ten parents had seen their children display behaviours that suggested heightened anxiety since the outbreak of Covid-19.

Almost half of the 1,000 parents of four- to twelve-year-olds who took part in the survey in Britain said they felt that the pandemic had also “negatively impacted” on their children’s friendships.

This has given rise to issues such as stress, fear, anxiety, depression, adjustment issues, apprehensions towards the future, surfacing of the previous and past undiagnosed and untreated mental health disorders, fear, phobia, and obsessions of contamination, fear of physical interactions, fear of uncertainty leading to helplessness. 

Schools can provide supportive platforms for children to share and talk about their feelings and fears to mental health professionals. They can render massive help by emphasising the importance of speaking out when disturbed or confused. This will help prevent and manage a lot of mental health issues that children could be facing. I work at a school that takes the wellbeing of the students very seriously. Class time is allocated regularly for Circle Time, Wellbeing sessions and wellbeing is always a focus at assemblies. 

What is good mental health? 

It is when we can cope with the stressors of our daily lives, participate in loving relationships, contribute to our community, and work towards our goals. So everyone has mental health, even children.

How many children have mental illness?

In 2013–14, an estimated 314,000 children aged 4–11 (almost 14%) experienced a mental disorder in the 12 months before the survey (Lawrence et al. 2015). Boys were more commonly affected than girls (17% compared with 11%).

ADHD was the most common disorder for children (8.2%), and the most common among boys (11%).

Anxiety disorders were the second most common disorders among all children (6.9%), and the most common among girls (6.1%).

More recent data, that factors in the pandemic, will probably show higher figures.

Teachers at my school frequently ask for books to support their Social and Emotional Programs, so there are shelves in the nonfiction section that now have many more books than they did in the past. There are books about feelings and emotions, books about neurodiversity,  mindfulness, tolerance, resilience, growth mindset and general wellbeing.

   

Start with What's in Your Mind Today? by Louise Bladen 

Then, the  most borrowed books about feelings are:

• In My Heart: A Book of Feelings  by Jo Witek and Christine Roussey

• The Colour Monster by Anna Llenas

• Feelings by Libby Walden and Richard Jones

• The Boy With Big Big Feelings by Britney Winn Lee and Jacob Souva

• Visiting Feelings by Lauren Rubenstein and Shelly Hehenberger

• How Are You Feeling Today? by Molly Potter and Sarah Jennings

• Big Feelings by Alexandra Penfold and Suzanne Kaufmann

About worries and anxiety:

• Ruby's Worry by Tom Percival 

• The Worrying Worries  by Rachel Rooney and Zahra Hicks

• Jeremy Worried About the Wind  by Pamela Butchart and Kate Hindley

• Jack's Worry by Sam Zuppardi

• What's Worrying You? by Molly Potter and Sarah Jennings

• Brave Every Day  by Trudy Ludwig and Patrice Barton

• When You Are Brave by Pat Zietlow Miller and Eliza Wheeler

Other general titles:

• What's Going on in my Head? by Molly Potter and Sarah Jennings

• The Invisible Boy by Trudy Ludwig and Patrice Barton

• Tomorrow I'll Be Brave  by Jessica Hische

• Brave by Stacey McAnulty and Joanne Lew-Vriethoff

• When Sadness Comes to Call by Eva Eland

• Mr Huff  by Anna Walker

• A World of Pausibilities  by Frank J. Sileo and Jennifer Zivoin

Of course there are many more books than this.

See here for more books on worries and anxiety.

See here for books on mindfulness.

Mental Health Awareness Week (18th - 24th May)

It is Mental Health Awareness Week in the UK. (Watch the video embedded in the link) Don't know about here, but given COVID 19 it is relevant everywhere. I was pleased to read the theme this year is kindness, even more fitting, and something that is easy to 'zoom in' on at school.

The teachers at my school spend a lot of time with their classes 'filling buckets' and kindness is often a Circle Time topic. As school resumes for all students next week perhaps it is time for a welcome back display in the library that includes 'kindness' books. Books I'd include in my display are those here and here.

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10th October World Mental Health Day

This week is Mental Health Week. Yesterday was World Mental Health Day and mental health is certainly something that teachers need to be more aware of than we were in the past. Every class has children who struggle with anxiety, who worry excessively, who have anger issues and who appear especially despondent or unengaged, but the good thing is that because teachers now worry about emotional intelligence as well as academic and social intelligences, they plan for the teaching of it and have much better protocols for identifying and remedying these concerns.

Teachers program for and conduct Circle Time in their classrooms. They encourage students to talk about their feelings, to express their feelings through play, drama and art. They read and discuss wonderful stories that highlight feelings and strategies for overcoming feelings.

In the last couple of years four books have been published about feelings which allow for children to understand that everyone feels a gambit of emotions and that this is normal. These are:




















* Feelings: Inside My Heart and in My Head...
 by Libby Walden and Richard Jones.
* In My Heart A Book of Feelings  by Jo Witek
* The Great Big Book of Feelings by Mary Hoffman and Ros Asquith
* A Book of Feelings by Amanda McCardie and Salvatore Rubbino


While these are certainly not the only books that may be useful, these do cover more than one feeling in one book. There is a myriad of purpose written series about emotions with one emotion per book.

With the young children I teach I like to look at the expressions a fish can have in Mies Van Hout's illustrations in her book Happy and then discuss the emotion illustrated by connecting it back to themselves and when they have felt this way.


Another approach is to read a picture book where a character is having a particularly sad time and look at what happens to the character before discussing this situation. Two recent books that do this are:
* Mr Huff by Anna Walker,    and
* Willy and the Cloud by Anthony Browne.


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