The Welcome to Well-Being programme is a multi-year programme for children from Junior Infants to First Class. It is designed to enhance children’s well-being across all dimensions – social, emotional, spiritual, physical and mental. Enhancing children’s well-being can lead to a wide variety of other successful outcomes including increased academic performance, better relationships and increased resilience – (Waters, 2011; Park & Peterson, 2008 )
Specific aims of Welcome to Well-Being: Meet Mo & Ko (Junior Infants)
- To increase children’s understanding of specific emotions including happiness, sadness, anger, pride and bravery
- To encourage children to accept and express all of their emotions in a positive way
- To provide children with the opportunity to upregulate the following positive emotions – joy, happiness, gratitude, serenity (calm), pride and humour
- To provide students with the opportunity to regulate and express their feelings of sadness and anger
- To promote feeling of self-confidence and self-worth
- To promote self-efficacy through giving children strategies to deal with their strong emotions
- To develop pro-social relationships through encouraging acts of kindness and appropriate expression of emotions