Wellness Wednesdays have been added as a new monthly event in the Media Center after a successful first try in January. While initially planned to be like any other one-time event, the Media Center staff decided to implement it in addition to other lunchtime activities in order to fulfill a need for relaxation due to Skyline’s large focus on rigorous academics.
Proposed by Media Clerk Anna Nelson, Wellness Wednesday was originally created alongside ideas for a display focusing on emotions and depression. Nelson said, “The studies show that [January is] usually when there’s an increase in waves of depression, so we wanted to have a lunch where students could come in and just relax and decompress a little bit.”
Library Media Educational Technology Specialist (LMETS) Heidi Williams was quickly supportive of Nelson’s idea, ordering all the necessary materials with the library budget. The staff assembled wellness goodie bags, containing pens, journals, lollipops, squishy toys, and pop-its. These, alongside a hot drink station with hot cocoa mix and tea bags, were a major pull for students attending.
This was the case for Junior Elisa Tandra and her friends, who attended Wellness Wednesday on February 4. “I heard about the Wellness Wednesday on the announcements, and I was like, ‘Do you guys want to get some hot cocoa?’ so we all went upstairs, because we didn’t really have anything to do during intervention time,” Tandra explained.
Nelson also prioritized setting up different stations so that students could reflect and recenter themselves if they’d recently been stressed or upset. “In January, I wanted to highlight journaling, so I had a table of journaling and then our little goodie bags had journals and a pen in it,” Nelson explained. For February, she added another station focused on breathing techniques, complete with cards showing different techniques that students could take. Nelson added, “I’m just going to implement different things each month, new ways of coping and stuff like that. I don’t know if students really take the time to do any of those or recognize it, but I want it to be there for people that want it.”
The event has been well-received each time, with Nelson reporting that the second Wellness Wednesday had more people attending than the first. She said, “It brought in different students than normally come to the library, which was interesting.”
New or familiar, many students walked away from Wellness Wednesday feeling good. Tandra said, “It was nice to have a break from school that wasn’t just lunchtime. It was a little bit more quiet and a little bit more intentional.”
