Blog Feed

Today, Thursday March the 7th, is World Book Day. It encourages us to celebrate reading and reminds us how essential reading is to the young minds of the future.

Books provide children and young people with a sense of escapism from reality or difficult circumstances and allow them to discover stories on their own terms in a language they understand. In an era of technology books have an important role to play and the CLB team has a great book list of books to support change, loss and bereavement. Please take the time to visit our booklist page, find out more about some of our recommended books and take the time to read a couple. The list has a wide range of books associated with change and loss. These are just some of the great resources out there. We try to add new ones as we discover them, and we recommend having them in the home/borrowing them from the library/keeping some in your classroom to normalise change and loss for our children and young people.

Children’s Mental Health Week 2024 will take place from 5^th to 11^th February 2024. This year’s theme is ‘My Voice Matters’.  There is a link to a very brief video to explain a little more around what this means:

More information can be found on the Children’s Mental Health Week website, which is:

https://www.childrensmentalhealthweek.org.uk

Why not have a look at the Highland Wellbeing Website, which has lots of helpful links to services and resources to support children and young people, and has proven to be useful for parents/carers and professionals too.

https://www.wellbeinghighland.co.uk

At this time of national mourning, children and young people might have questions about what has happened or be dealing with feelings of grief for numerous reasons. Adults supporting children and young people might need some guidance on how to respond. Winston’s Wish have created a support page with easy to read information and plan to update it with resources and information, including guides on how to support young people and answer their questions Winston’s Wish – Supporting Children and young People on the Death of the Queen

Please also remember that we have a book list and other resources that you can find under the Professionals section of the website.

.

Are you considering what training you would like to access in the year ahead? Or are you a companion who needs to attend a reconnector to remain accredited? Has your accreditation lapsed, but you would like to be able to still deliver Seasons? Trained CYP Companion but now interested in being able to offer the Parent Programme?

It’s never too early to get booked on to our training for the year ahead. Visit the Seasons Training page to see all of the dates available to new and existing Seasons companions.

If you are completely new to Seasons, take a look at our Training Pathway first to decide which training and which staff are most suited to what is on offer.

Our Change, Loss & Bereavement Training Dates for 2022/23 will be published soon and sign up will be via the Highland CPD calendar. Further information to follow.

We have created a short video that may be useful for you if you would like to watch and hear about the Seasons Children & Young People Programme or the Seasons Parent Programme. This may be particularly useful for sharing with School staff, Parents or C&YP if you are looking at getting the programme up and running in your school.

Keep an eye on the blog for our training dates for the year ahead, they will be coming very soon!

Our Change, Loss and Bereavement sessions continue to be on offer for the remainder of this academic year. Our next session is next Tuesday, the 22nd of March at 4pm. The session is delivered over google meet, gives an introduction to change and loss and is suitable for any member of staff working with children, young people and their families.
For more information, or to book a place please contact jo.chamberlain@highland.gov.uk

We also continue to offer Seasons for Growth C&YP Training and Parent Programme Training. Our C&YP Training is almost full for the year, with one or two spaces left on the June dates – if you want one of these spaces, get in touch quickly!

Our Parent Programme Training is running for the last time this academic year on Tuesday 26th April. If you or a member of your team are already trained in the C&YP programme and would like to be able to deliver the Parent Programme please get in touch (again ASAP) to sign up. Places are limited and we are placing orders for materials in the coming days. If you want further information about what the programme and the training entails, again; get in touch with Jo to find out more.

Just a quick reminder that our CLB training is running on the In-Service day next week. If you or someone you know has been keen to access this training please contact jo.chamberlain@highland.gov.uk for joining instructions. The session is 1.5 hours long, with time built in for questions and discussion.

See how the training fits in to the bigger picture on our Training Pathway.

Please also note the dates available for the rest of the school year. To book on to one of these just get in touch.

Apologies to those of you who logged in and waited for the CLB training this afternoon. The wrong timings were on the flyer. There we were an hour earlier thinking nobody was joining us. Hopefully you will be able to join us at one of our sessions next term. See attached, updated flyer, with all of the right times on it, and sign up information.

In our final post of the week, we just want to thank you for reading and by doing so marking To Absent Friends Festival with us.

We want to remind you that normalising grief, children & young people come to realise that they are not the only ones. That there isn’t something ‘wrong’ with them for feeling the way they feel. That is why we can’t recommend books and stories enough.

Some other good books read loud are I miss you: a first look at death, or You’ll Find Me – Children’s book about loss and Grieving

The Wilds Poetry Comic is a beautiful resource for older young people.

Child Bereavement UK have some really useful resources and videos, including this one about supporting a bereaved child who is autistic or one about telling a child that someone has died.