North West Central School is celebrating Canada's Mental Health Awareness week in the best way possible, by talking about it. The school has activities planned for the entire week, involving the students, that were inspired by an organization, Jack.org.

Shari Gebhard, a teacher at North West Central, spoke to West Central Online about the organization the week has been inspired by, "Jack.Org is an organization and they have smaller chapters around the country to raise awareness, and what they are trying to do is get rid of the stigma and it's youth driven, it's not driven by adults. They come out and teach kids how to speak in public about mental health. Basically create awareness so they can educate others so there's not so much stigma around and people can come forward and tell their story and feel comfortable." Shari hopes they can take these goals and put it into the school.

Students helped plan activities to bring awareness to mental health for the week, a few activities were inspired by Jack.org. Monday was green ribbon day and ribbons were worn by all the kids. On Tuesday Jacqueline Weese, a yoga and Pilates instructor, came in and taught kids how they can cope with anxiety or stress through body relaxation exercises like yoga. Wednesday followed with more presentations on what mental illness is and how it affects the brain.

Thursday will have a puppet show presentation for the Kindergarten to Grade 3 kids. Friday is semi-colon day, the semi-colon project is a movement where people will draw a semi-colon on usually their wrist to represent where an author could have ended a sentence but did not. The author is the wearer of the semi-colon and the sentence is their life. Kindergartens to grade 5 will have teacher read book and stop halfway through , and ask what would happen if the story was not finished and then relate it to personal experiences of the kids.