Wee Seeds sprouts with launch of new digital meditation toolbox for early years
Wee Seeds officially launches today after over two years of hard work, testing, and prototyping, to release its first mindfulness and mediation digital toolbox for young children!
The exercises for parents and professionals to use with the preschool children, aim to plant the seeds of calm, focus, kindness and sleep through mindfulness and meditation. We want to help nurture preschoolers’ emotional, mental and physical wellbeing, as well as create family connections and calm spaces.
It has been a long journey from Wee Seeds’ Founder Christina Cran’s initial Good Idea of making “something” to help teach young children mindfulness to being the functioning digital toolbox released today.
That journey wouldn’t have been possible without the help of some wonderful people and organisations, including: Melting Pot’s Good Ideas programme, Business Gateway, Scottish Enterprise, Edinburgh Napier University, University of Edinburgh’s Mastercard Foundation programme, as well as many others!
And the digital toolbox couldn’t have been created without seed-funding from UnLtd and Seedbed, and the AMAZING £7,000 raised from 123 incredible crowd-funders.
We also give our utmost thanks to Dr Vee Freir, consultant clinical psychologist and co-ordinator of the NHS Mindfulness Project, who has believed in Wee Seeds since she first heard about the concept, giving her time to nurture the idea and create exercises for our first testing programme last year.
We’ve been so inspired and motivated to develop our new toolbox thanks to the continued motivation from parents and professionals who tell us they want it!
Last year our group of ‘Super-Parents’ tested out the exercises at home with their families.
- 75% of these parents told us their child became more calm, easier to put to bed, and thought that the exercises helped their child to control anger and frustration.
- 75% of the parents felt calmer themselves and enjoyed spending time with their children.
Then in summer 2019, more families tested out the current Wee Seeds web-app and we’ve received 100% positive feedback!
But we also want nursery staff, childminders and other early years professionals to be able to use the exercises with the children they work with. So, today also marks the start of around 20 partnerships with nurseries across the UK who will test out the exercises and tell us all about how they work in the nursery setting.
Christina’s vision for the digital tools have been brought to life by designer, Emma Chapman and award-winning creative agency, Primate. It has also been supported by Lorna Walker, Wellbeing Specialist and Founder of Compassionate System and former Creative Director of Youth Mindfulness, voice actor Matthew Dudley, pre-school yoga teacher Rhona Bythell, and 7-year olds Fin and Jocelyn who voiced ‘Bug Yoga’ and ‘Heart to Heart’.
The digital toolbox also marks a re-brand for Wee Seeds with Emma’s designs utilising shape, colour and character. She wanted to make a twist on the traditional scientific colour wheel which shows the relationship between the scientific representation of emotion and colour — and has created a wonderful new look for us! She has also designed our new logo — Sprout the seedling!
We have big plans for Wee Seeds and by the end of the next year (funding dependant) hope to have introduced a subscription model with categorised themes, more exercises and regular content updates. But importantly that subscription model will be on a Buy One Give One Away term meaning subscribers can ‘pay-it-forward’ and give access to children and families that might benefit from the Wee Seeds exercises most.
So — visit www.weeseeds.co.uk to access your free toolkit now while you can!
Today is a special day in the Wee Seeds journey — but it is also five years since Christina was first diagnosed with the life-changing Type 1 diabetes. It was this diagnosis that sparked her entrepreneurial journey to create Wee Seeds. Read more about her story here.
