R U OK? Day Activities: Fun Ways to Support Student Wellbeing
Hey teacher!
R U OK? Day falls on the second Thursday of September — Thursday 10 September in 2026 — and it is all about checking in with each other and making sure everyone feels heard, supported and understood.
Whether it is talking about our feelings, spreading kindness, or learning how to be there for a friend, there are so many ways to get involved.
Below are the activities we come back to every year, plus the free resources worth downloading before the day. Most of them take five minutes to prep.
Free R U OK? Day Resources for Your Classroom
Before you plan anything from scratch, have a look at the R U OK? education page. It is genuinely one of the best free resource libraries going, and it is all made for Australian classrooms.
What you will find there for primary:
- Primary educator calendar — one wellbeing idea for every month, so the message does not live and die on a single day in September.
- Conversation Bingo — a get-to-know-you grid that gets kids talking to classmates they would not normally pick.
- Colour-in bunting template — the easiest whole-class display you will ever set up.
- Mural builder — a bigger collaborative display if you have a wall to fill.
- Colouring-in sheets built around the four conversation steps.
- Word searches — a 10-word and a 30-word version, handy for early finishers.
- Student art activity — explores what it means to be a good friend, and comes with judging criteria and a certificate if you want to run it as a competition.
- Postcards for students to write a check-in message to someone.
Foster Wellbeing with Our Daily Gratitude Printable
Help your students build resilience and a positive mindset with our Daily Gratitude printable. This simple but powerful activity encourages students to reflect on the good moments in their day, helping them build a habit of gratitude that supports their emotional wellbeing.
It is an easy way to spark conversations about mental health, and it shows students that even small acts of reflection can make a big difference.
Use it as part of your R U OK? Day activities, or weave it into your daily classroom routine.
Feelings Faces Chart
R U OK? Day is a great opportunity to teach your students about the importance of naming feelings.
Activity: Create a large chart with various feeling faces — happy, sad, angry, confused and so on. Each student gets a small cut-out face or a sticky note with their name on it. Throughout the day, students place their face on the chart to show how they are feeling.
It is a brilliant way for students to identify their emotions and to see that it is completely okay to have different ones. It also gives you a quiet way to spot who might need a bit of extra support.
Printable feelings chart from Fun with Mama →
R U OK? Role-Playing
This one has students practising the actual skill — how to ask, and what to do with the answer.
Activity: In pairs, students take turns being the asker and the receiver. The asker practises asking "are you OK?" and the receiver draws from a set of scenario cards — feeling sad because a friend is away, nervous about a test, left out at lunch. They then role-play the conversation.
Give them the four steps to work from and it stops being guesswork: ask, listen, encourage action, check in. That structure is the heart of the whole campaign, and it is a genuinely useful thing for a ten-year-old to carry into high school.
Kindness Tree
A display that grows over the day, or the whole week.
Activity: Create a large tree on a bulletin board or wall. Give each student paper leaves to write or draw acts of kindness they have done or received. Leaves get added to the tree as the week goes on.
By Friday you have a visual record of how much kindness moved around your room — which is a much better argument than anything you could say out loud. If a tree feels like too much cutting, the R U OK? colour-in bunting does the same job with a fraction of the prep.
See 15 kindness trees from real schools →
Feelings Bingo
Activity: Create bingo cards with different emotions written or illustrated in each square — happy, sad, excited, worried. Read out scenarios as a class and students mark off how they think the person might feel. "You lost your favourite toy." "You won a prize at school."
It is a fun way to connect situations with emotions, and to show that talking about feelings is completely normal.
For a warm-up before you get into the emotions version, R U OK?'s free Conversation Bingo is a good way in — it is a get-to-know-you grid rather than a feelings one, so it gets students moving and talking to people they do not usually sit with.
Printable emotion bingo cards from Carrie Elle →
Story Time and Discussion
Activity: Read a book about emotions, kindness or checking in with friends. Afterwards, run a discussion on the themes — how did the character feel? What could their friends have done to help?
It is a good way to make big ideas about mental health feel ordinary and talkable, and it builds empathy without ever having to use the word.
A few of our favourites:
Don't Forget the Staffroom
While you are busy building something meaningful for your students, it is worth checking in on the adults too.
Our Staff Wellbeing Notes are a simple way to brighten a colleague's day. Print them on coloured card, write a line, and leave one on a desk with a coffee or a bit of chocolate.
A small thing, but it lands — especially in the middle of a term when everyone is running on fumes.
Every day is the day to ask
These are not one-off exercises. The point of R U OK? Day is that it gives you a reason to teach the skill — and then the skill stays.
Keep the chart on the wall. Keep asking. A class that knows how to check in on each other in September is a different class in November.
If a conversation in your classroom raises something you are worried about, follow your school's wellbeing process and loop in your student services team. R U OK? also has guidance for staff on what to do when someone says they are not OK.
The Mrs Edgar Resources Used in This Post
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