A DINOSAUR called Wellasaurus and two women from Bolton have helped to ease children’s anxiety caused by lockdown and aided their development.
The story behind the dino-help and how it has expanded to calm youngsters, restore their confidence and teach them self-belief began a year ago.
Mandy Worsley, based in Turton, is a qualified paediatric nurse with 30 years’ experience in health and social care, now working as a health and wellbeing specialist. Julie Robinson is a qualified teacher with more than 25 years’ experience in education and is also owner of Eagley School House Nurseries.
During lockdown, Julie had kept open for front-line families “and I noticed a lot of anxiety among the children as well as stress among parents and staff,” she explained.
So, Julie and five other local nurseries used a dinosaur called Wellasaurus to create a programme to encourage children to return to nursery during lockdown and afterwards.
“It was a fun way to help them feel safe and they loved to sing the Wellasaurus song!” said Julie.
Julie had worked with Mandy previously on delivering health and wellbeing support so she asked her to form a partnership looking at incorporating mindfulness into the daily lives of little children.
This led to the duo setting up business Mini Minds Matter UK in 2021 when they also began to write their first book.
Within a year, four more books were written to support this programme and Wellasaurus gained more friends including Happyasaurus, Kindasaurus, Uniqueasaurus and Strongasaurus.
Now, the programme has been rolled out to more than 30 partners including nurseries, schools, after-school clubs, farm schools, a special needs’ school and a women’s refuge.
Julie and Mandy have received awards for the concept and reached best-seller status online for their books, sold on Amazon.
They also secured sponsorship from a local business to part-fund the programme’s annual fee making it accessible to charities, child minders and foster carers.
“We’d really love to build more links with small businesses who feel they may like to support their local school, nursery or carer to have access to this award-winning approach,” added Mandy.
Mini Minds has already received official approval. Eagley House Nurseries’ just published OFSTED inspection reported the programme as “life changing.”
It added it “enables children to embed skills to support emotional intelligence to cope in Modern Britain”.
And that’s the kind of happy ending which Wellasaurus would fully approve.
• For more information go to www.minimindsmatter.org.uk
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