Home The Project
A five-activity art-based intervention for children, developed from a research review, tested with neurodiverse children in a specialist school, then delivered by trained teachers in a rural mainstream school.
Art for Wellbeing documents Shruti Arvind’s work developing and testing a five-activity art-based intervention for children, from a review of published research to evaluation in a school.
The toolkit
Five structured creative activities, each translating findings from the research into something a teacher can run in an ordinary classroom.
The kit
A creative kit designed to help children explore emotions, express themselves freely, and build confidence, one activity at a time.
What’s inside
Tear out pictures, words or shapes you love from a magazine and arrange them into a collage, choosing what you like, not what is “perfect”.
Scribble freely with no rules, then pick four of ten emojis that describe how you felt yesterday, and share why if you would like to.
Brush clean water onto the paper, add colour and watch it spread, blend and settle, with prompts to notice, name and wait.
Draw anything you like, then brush water over the chalk lines and watch the colours mix and change.
Tape three stencils to the paper, put on a blindfold and colour inside the shapes without looking, enjoying the experience rather than a perfect result.
Field settings
Field test 1, 2025 · Specialist school
Initial implementation in a specialist school environment provided an opportunity to observe how the activities worked with children with autism and how they could be adapted to individual needs.
Field test 2, 2026 · Rural mainstream school
Manjakkudi, Tamil Nadu
Swami Dayananda School is a rural mainstream school. Here the toolkit was implemented with children in Grades 4–5, and classroom teachers were trained to run the activities themselves, twice a week over five weeks. Questionnaires were developed in English and Tamil to support pre- and post-intervention evaluation.
Field work
Workshops led by Shruti: introducing activities, then working alongside children and teachers as they create.
