A Treasury of Tools for Mental Health

The Extraordinary Book that Makes You Feel Happy is a treasury of tools for good mental health. On each page you’ll find an aspect of wellbeing, explained in accessible and child-friendly language. Accompanying each topic is a paper-based activity to tear out, make and keep. With gorgeous illustrations by Caribay M. Benavides, every page offers a beautiful visual representation of its theme.

In a school or library setting, this book offers a real wealth of inspiration. It can be read and enjoyed any time – there’s no need to wait for a child to feel upset or anxious as the content relates to everyday life and the whole rainbow of emotions human beings experience. The step-by-step projects are easy to follow and need only the most basic materials that can be bought or found at home/school. Children can either cut out the templates or trace over them to use again and again.

Using Play to Support Mental Health Conversations

It can be difficult to engage children with books about mental health, so the interactive nature of The Extraordinary Book that Makes You Feel Happy was really exciting for me.

Coming up with activities that ticked all the boxes was a big challenge: each one needed to be fun, relevant to the page’s theme and on some level let the child experience the aspect of well-being the page describes.

It’s well known that children learn best through play, so to make a topic like mental health come alive for kids, it’s essential to make it fun. While talking about emotions and mental health can be confronting or uncomfortable for children (and adults!), making the subject visually appealing and playful helps kids to open up gently, and brings the topic into everyday life in a non-threatening way.

Developing Important Life Skills

This book doesn’t just focus on ‘issues’, it also helps children to build important life skills.

For example, by developing patience children are more likely to slow down and live more mindfully, thus avoiding anxiety and stress. The Extraordinary Book that Makes You Feel Happy uses a number of activities to encourage different levels (a build-up, even) of practising being patient. These include:

• Collecting and arranging coloured leaves in a pattern – this might only need 15 minutes of patience or can stretch to much longer if a child gets very involved.
• Building a domino run takes a little more time, patience and practice – especially if you knock over a piece by mistake!
• Baking requires quite a bit of patience to carry through each step of the recipe. But breadsticks take more patience than usual because you have to wait a whole hour for the dough to rise. Otherwise your breadsticks will be pretty flat!
• For the ultimate test of patience, grow sunflowers – it takes around 16 weeks before you can eat the seeds!

For each patience-focused activity, we explain the concept in a few words, for example, in the context of growing a sunflower from a seed. Then we go straight into bringing the experience of patience to life. These patience activities can be tried in the classroom or at home.

Bursting with more than 30 projects, activities and ideas, The Extraordinary Book that Makes You Feel Happy is a book for every child to help them to express themselves, build life skills and resilience and feel connected to themselves and to others.