Cartwheel Arts - Wellbeing Dominoes

Cartwheel Arts is a participatory arts charity with 40 years’ experience delivering high quality arts programmes in Rochdale and Greater Manchester.

Our vision is for a world where everyone has access and opportunities to create, participate and belong. We specialise in arts, health and participation and our co-production model celebrates the creativity within everyone, developing talent and generating a sense of ownership, pride and well-being.

Our Wellbeing Dominoes resource is a visual arts facilitation tool that’s based around the 5 ways to wellbeing. It’s designed to be delivered in a group setting over a set number of weeks with the same pupils. This supports in developing good relationships and protected time for your pupils and the trained facilitators to work together on a variety of fun and experimental art activities.

We have already trained over 70 schools in Rochdale, many with multiple staff members who have completed our training programme and are using Wellbeing Dominoes regularly within their settings. 

We have found lots of benefits to using the resource such as:

- EAL students felt more included 

- Friendships formed

- Children found ways to cope with stress and keep calm

- Increased confidence and mood

- A decrease in behavior that challenges and increased engagement with those pupils

- Strengthened relationships between staff and students

- Pupils appeared noticeably relaxed

Wellbeing Dominoes is underpinned by our commitment to supporting your school and staff to train as Wellbeing Dominoes facilitators, taking ownership of the tool once fully completing the training programme we offer.

Identified staff members are invited to an immerse creative training day with two of our highly qualified Art for Wellbeing practitioners. They will leave with the skills and confidence to deliver 32 creative activities in a group setting focused on improving wellbeing. Once trained we encourage and support schools to facilitate a parent taster day that ensures parents are fully informed. In some circumstances parents have even requested their own group to benefit from Wellbeing Dominoes.

Schools can then identify a group, time and space and trained facilitators can utilise their new skills. We conduct a quality assurance visit to ensure your facilitators are well supported and have access to feedback from our Art for Wellbeing practitioners.

A certificate is issued and Wellbeing Dominoes is yours to use for as many groups as you like as many times as you’d like to use it. We celebrate with a dedicated reflection session where trained facilitators can come together and share their experiences of delivering. This is a great networking opportunity and supports shared learning and development between schools.

We’ve worked closely with Rochdale Borough Council to develop this tried and tested programme and even reworked the resource to include art work made by local pupils.

Cost of the training programme depends on how many people attend, so please register interest for a training session before the Easter break in 2025.