New for April 2020 

Welcome to The Mindfulness Project at Home.  

Tangled Feet are sharing their Mindfulness Project through a series of online workshops for families from Monday 20th April on YouTube. A new video will be released every Monday at 11am for the next 10 weeks. To launch the programme we have being sharing a short mindful activity everyday on our social media platforms; Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. You can find us @tangledfeet

Click on the link below to see the list of activities plus two videos 'How to build a paper boat' and 'Storm Jar':

10 Mini Mindfulness Activites

How to make a paper boat

How to make a storm jar

Each week, Emily Eversden, Participation Director, Tangled Feet and Rachel Rookwood, Yoga and Mindfulness Teacher, Adventure Yoga, will lead a session that uses yoga, storytelling, mindfulness exercises and drama to encourage children to explore their creativity. The programme is designed to create time to uncover and express their thoughts and feelings. It provides opportunities for children to take time to understand that all our minds get a bit stuck sometimes and that everyone, children and adults alike, are finding these current times strange. Children will learn techniques to manage stress and will develop their confidence and communication skills.

Week 1:

Week 2:

Week 3

Week 4

In 2018 our Participation Director, Emily Eversden, left her position as a secondary school drama teacher to re-join Tangled Feet (after previously co-founding TF in 2003).  In her 15-year teaching career Emily has seen and experienced the pressures, politics and dynamics of in-school education, and having educated hundreds of children, Emily identified an urgent and growing need to offer supplementary support to children who were struggling with depression and anxiety at key transition ages.  The support required was not part of the national curriculum, and schools have little or no budget (nor time) to help children with these needs – meaning children are falling behind through no fault of their own. This need has also been highlighted in many reports on the mental health of young people.

Where:   

Primary schools – KS1

Secondary schools and colleges – KS5

Who for:  

Students living with/at risk of living with feelings of anxiety or isolation

The Project:

Tangled Feet (TF) will deliver a ten week 'Mindfulness and Wellbeing Through Theatre' project for up to 20 pupils in your school setting. Participants will be students at important transition stages (Year 1 groups, Year 12 groups) and will be experiencing issues with confidence and anxiety that are impacting negatively on their mental health, and subsequently, their in-school achievements.

Each week, a timetabled activity session led by TF workshop leaders will use, yoga, concentration and mindfulness exercises, dramatherapy activities and drama games to help participants overcome nerves, learn techniques to manage stress, and encourage them to explore their creativity by telling, sharing and performing stories in whatever technique/format works for the individual participant. Using separate funding we have secured from The Andrew Lloyd Webber Foundation we will recruit a local young person as an intern on the project, their role will be as Workshop Assistant to support TF's Participation Director to deliver the project.

At the start of the delivery of the project our Participation Director will begin preliminary work with your school to identify pupils to participate on the 10 week programme which will be delivered over the course of this term. The project will be evaluated by TF and the participating schools, and completed by the end of the term of delivery. The schools that take part in the project will all agree to deliver the weekly activity sessions as timetabled sessions - not during lunch hours/after school.   

Evaluation: We will conduct an 'emotional audit' of the participants at beginning, middle, and end of the project - collecting quantitative data that charts the participants feelings of nervousness, anxiety, and confidence on a scale of 1 to 10. With this data we can track the progress being made by the participants and it will help us inform future TF projects of a similar nature. We will re-visit each school to have a debrief session with the participants and teachers and collect their thoughts on what worked well and where the project could be improved in the future.      

Participants will learn skills and coping techniques that help them manage and overcome nerves, low-confidence and anxiety problems that may be having a detrimental impact on their mental health. Using dramatherapy and theatre-making exercises the participants will make new friends, find new levels of confidence, and become emotionally well equipped to tackle the challenges in their immediate futures. They will become ambassadors for positive mental health at their school.

Participating schools and teachers can receive training and will be left with information packs and schemes of work for lesson plans to re-mount the project with other groups of students in the future.  TF evaluate the project to build on the findings and successes by rolling out the project in more schools in the following academic year to help schools achieve the Arts Mark status.

The students will be the primary beneficiaries. We anticipate they will be individuals low on confidence, experiencing nerves and anxiety in their daily lives, and struggling to cope emotionally with the pressures of school life at two key transition ages. Building confidence to express themselves and learning to problem solve, the participants will find their voices and share stories in a safe and supportive surrounding, taking part in age-specific exercises that can help to clear the mind, focus, relax and concentrate.  We will work with the in-school safeguarding lead to help identify behaviours symptomatic of young people experiencing emotional problems to select the participants.

The schools participating will also benefit, helping to raise awareness of mental health and mindfulness issues amongst students and teachers. TF will be raising awareness about the importance of mindfulness and positive attitudes towards mental health, and we will leave the participating schools with information packs that will enable them to deliver activities from the project. We will help to create and sustain a culture that can support emotional wellbeing of young people, particularly those at transition ages.

We hope the participants will have an understanding that the skills learned in the yoga, mindfulness and theatre practice can have a positive impact on their lives, on whatever path they follow. Participants will learn coping techniques to help them overcome difficult moments in their lives, and learn how to identify if their friends and peers are also struggling with similar problems. Their confidence will increase, and their communication skills will be enhanced - this will have a long-term and positive impact on those taking part.

emily@tangledfeet.com