My Good Brain Summer Art x Mental Wellness Workshops
This summer, My Good Brain hosted art and mental wellness workshops at the Fremont Main Library! The three workshops allowed children to expand their knowledge on mental health with hands-on activities. The event was led by Dr. Danessa Mayo, the CEO and founder of My Good Brain, and co-hosted with volunteers Jenni Liao and Riya Shelar, who presented and led the art activities. Let’s take a deeper dive into each event and the mental health topics covered during the workshops.
We understand how beneficial it is to help children learn at a young age how to cope with an immense amount of stress or rusty friendships. With lessons and fun activities, our team hoped to create workshops that would be exciting as well as informational. By learning healthy coping strategies early on, children can adapt to negative situations easier and deal with unpleasant emotions in a safe way. Before the events, Jenni and Riya created “de-stress kits” for the attendees, which included sensory stress balls, coloring books with crayons and stickers. Through their research, they found that these types of objects could help students regulate their emotions, express their creativity, and feel calm.
On July 19th, Dr. Mayo, Riya and Jenni hosted the “Our Emotions” workshop, teaching children all about the different types of emotions and ways to deal with them. In this event, attendees were taught how to create an “My Feelings Poster” and draw various emotions. The attendees also got to have fun testing their new knowledge on emotions with a four-square game! Attendees were presented with several example situations and had to guess the related emotion. The attendees found the games extremely fun and informative, learning about various emotions felt in the example situations, with an addition of running!
On August 2nd, we hosted our second workshop focused on learning about “Stress and Mindfulness,” and attendees were taught how to create their own mindfulness jar. The Mindfulness Jar is a visual way of showing children what it looks and feels like when our brain is either in a stressful or calm state. The jar consists of water, glue and glitter; when the jar is shaken, it shows everyone how when we’re stressed, we may feel overwhelming emotions and have difficulty thinking clearly. But eventually, like the glitter, the feelings will change and calm down. The attendees also enjoyed the Q&A section of the event for a chance to win the de-stress kits raffled by Jenni and Riya!
Finally, our last workshop this past week on August 9th was about “Friendships and Gratitude.” In this event, attendees learned what makes a good friend and the importance of gratitude. The attendees thoroughly enjoyed themselves making friendship bracelets and gratitude cards for their friends and family members! We had a lot of fun hearing stories from children about the friends they were making the friendship bracelets for and reasons why they are good friends.
While summer may be ending, we are excited to see how the new school year turns out! As we plant seeds of learning for youth mental health and wellbeing, we are hopeful that the children who attend our events get to use their new social-emotional learning skills both at home and in school. And we can’t wait to share more art x mental wellness workshops in the near future, and we hope you can join us!
