Children, Pandemic and Mental Health: What can the school do?

On March 24th, 2020 India went into a state of complete lockdown. 
Our students were a week away from beginning their term-end assessments and in most likelihood eagerly looking forward to their summer vacation. We never imagined then, that we would slide into the summer break without meeting each other for a long, long time. We never imagined then, that we would begin a new school year, virtually, meeting each other on screens.

This has been a strange summer for all of us, especially our children.  Over the last few months, our children have had to learn new words ~ pandemic, curfew, lockdown, quarantine, social distancing. Sadly our vocabulary and world have been sanitised of words like friends, playing, grandparents, gardens, malls and eating out for fear of infection. It hasn’t been easy. A major concern for us as a school was our students’ well being and mental health.

Over the summer we tried to stay in touch with our students through story read alouds that made them think about many things, especially their feelings and emotions during this time. We saw stories as an important bridge between the old world, the old normals and the new uncertain world around us. The responses we received on story tasks from students via email and phone messenger apps buoyed our confidence and told us our students were receiving the videos with enthusiasm. 

As we slowly came to terms with reopening the school virtually, we knew that we didn’t want to plunge headlong into syllabus and portion completion. We devoted the first few weeks to community building and opening up new communication channels with parents and students. We first met parents and students virtually through class wise PTA meetings to discuss how we would move forward and to address their concerns. 

Teachers e-welcomed students to school through recorded video messages with an inspiring and positive thought for each student.

Sharon Primary Teachers Welcome you to the New Academic Year

In the first week, all the teachers met students and interacted with them virtually through short orientation programs. We tried to weave in social-emotional skills through hands-on activities that students did with teachers and shared with the class to get to know each other better. Teachers can no longer remain people who only teach…now more than ever teachers will also have to wear the hat of counsellors, in whatever way possible.

During this time we also tried to have a conversation about mental health and how it is as important as physical health. This video tried to tell children that it is normal to swing between emotions and what is important is that they share and express their feelings in some way. 

Lifting the Lockdown on our Feelings

Children were encouraged to make a mind map of the various emotions they’ve felt during this lockdown. It was interesting to see that many children were happy to be able to spend so much time with family. Boys and girls shared they’d learnt new things like cooking, gardening, playing cards and board games. Many children were relieved that the term end assessments were cancelled and dejected in the same measure about vacation plans going awry. Children also spoke about missing their grandparents, their friends and eating junk food. As the lockdown extended, frustration ran high as seen in the words children use ~ ‘chaotic’ ‘anxious’ ‘bored’ ‘irritated’ ‘stressed’ and ‘sad’. 

Read More Stories from School

Naming our emotions is perhaps a good first step to recognising how our mind works. We know that virtual classes will never be a good enough substitute for school. But we hear some are happy to have a new sense of routine resume with the virtual classes even though they terribly miss coming to school. 

We leave you with some of the work shared by students. It’s one step that we can take to understand the impact of this unprecedented lockdown on our children and their mental health. 

As a school, we hope to continue addressing this issue in the coming months.

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