Good resource for gathering some quick ideas you could turn into activities for the classroom
Organized into 10 minute ideas, 30 minute ideas and long term ideas.
Tag: ako
Five Ways to Well Being
A good resource to provide a platform for thinking about the ideas you could teach your students about mental well being.
Gives detailed definitions of each of these terms which you could adapt to any age group. Could even re name the terms to suit your class.
Also good practice to model these things yourselves.
Children of Mental Illness
Supporting Families Organisation
This organisation is a valuable resource for children who have a parent or loved one suffering from a mental illness.
Just as children who have parents suffering from other illnesses and have opportunities to find others in similar situations for support and advice the same goes for mental illness.
The resource section of this website has a series of useful links you could use when exploring mental illness for a health unit with your students.
Where is your mind?
(Warning: This may be an emotionally filled rant, with no real answers)
“Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”
this all started today with a simple question from a 13 year old boy. why do more boys kill themselves than girls?
To which my immediate response was.
wow.
um.
wow.
He simply heard it on the news and just wanted to know why.
After this discussion and a look at the most recent saddening statistics of how NZ has just hit the highest suicide rate since it started counting, i started to think about the impact this has on education.
And i’m not necessarily getting into the big things like suicide. When i say mental well-being im not just talking about the complex issues of mental health and mental illnesses but the every day life skills that help us cope with loss, change, stress and relationships. The skills that help us make healthy choices, that give us motivation to be the best version of ourselves, that give us the opportunity to help and connect with others.
Im going to acknowledge an embarrassing realisation which took me 20 years to figure out. Your mental well-being is just as important as nutrition and fitness.
and if you are my age, or older you may look at that and think well isn’t that obvious. but how obvious is it really?
what exactly is mental well-being? how exactly do i look after it?
During teaching college you learn a range of incredible ideas, you learn every aspect and key idea the curriculum covers, the complexity behind those ideas. Yet in reality you step into a classroom and see there is little time spent on these.
“Some things are just more important than others”,
“you will never succeed in life if you don’t have all these fundamental skills”
“There’s no time for that, that is the parents job”
Ask yourself, what is school for? To educate? to prepare you for the ‘real world’
If the point of education is to prepare our kids for the real world why is it that a topic that plays apart in our daily lives is given so little time. Providing students with opportunities to explore their mental well-being should not be something that is done once a year for a few week. It should be something we openly talk about. everyday. it should be teaching and modelling skills and it most defiantly cant be something that is just ‘the parents job’ what if the parent does not have the skills themselves to model to the students.
“Kids don’t have big problems to deal with”
There are two parts to this statement. firstly to a child something we see as minor can be the end of the world, and we need to acknowledge that to them that is their reality, no matter how much we see it as ‘stupid’ or ‘pathetic’ that child is still going to feel the way they feel in that moment.
Secondly if a student has healthy coping mechanism before a situation, when it arises they will be better equipped to deal with it.
So tell me again why “gender stereotypes are not as big a deal for males” when male youth suicide rate’s are significantly higher than any other.
tell me again how “students are to young to have issues” when young girls make up the greatest population of admission for self harm.
and tell me again why “there are simply more important things to teach” when the essence of succeeding and being happy its balanced, so fragile, on our ability to look after our mind.
Plans Change: Learning through Kendrick Lamar
“The world’ll know money can’t stop a suicidal weakness”
Today i experienced first hand what the teachers always tell us outside of campus, that no matter how much time and heart you put into your plans, plans change. Which is understandable life changes, and you can’t put students life’s into subtitles and boxes.
Today was my third lesson with a group of 10 senior students at a local high school. These are students who are all going through some difficult times in their life and causing some ‘trouble’ at school. Their school has created an after program to channel their ‘troubles’ into something creative in the hopes it will help their behaviors during school hours. I was brought in to teach them some basic photography.
Today we were going to start some creative inquires, discussing issues we would like to share through our photography, possible stories we wanted to tell. However, from the minute they walked in today i knew their minds were somewhere else. We started with one of my usual activities, which is whats on top, where we go around and say whats on our minds, how we are feeling, if there’s anything we are looking forward to or worried about.
Their words hit me like a bullet. They shared with me a story of a friend who had committed suicide last year, initially my thoughts were; am i in a position where i can discus these issues with these students safely.
But. As they kept talking it became apparent that although a sad situation these students were not sad, but excited to share with me their new revelation.
“Guilt trippin’ and feelin’ resentment I never met a transient that demanded attention”
They then spent the next half an hour explaining to me their theory that Kendrick Lamar’s new album feels like a tribute to their friend’s life. They showed me parts of songs, explained their meanings and told me stories about their friend. Aside from the overwhelming emotions these discussions evoked I was in AWE at the complexity of their an analysis, of the depth they went into to listen, look and think about the words. The hidden messages they brought out were leveling with the sorts of things we do in university poetry papers.
Before i met these kids my leader had told me to focus on the practical and avoid to writing informing me that they are not your “English, history kind of students”.
Well my plans have changed. We may not have got any practical work done today, but today was the first step into a in-depth project.
The new plan; the song and the lyrics are going to be inspiration and focusing for the issues we want to explore and tell through our photography. And we are going to do more than the basic skills. By the end we are going to have descriptions, annotations and analysis of our photography projects. They will be able to show their work to my leader and hopefully she will too learn a lesson from these inspiring kids.
Diary of a student teacher 