Moving from Learning and Living to the Teaching of Wellness

This post starts a new series focusing on teaching and integrating wellness into the culture of our classes. These prime activities and strategies are designed for elementary school but they can be adapted for MS and HS. Let’s get started!

• Character and Role Models – Design a series of short activities to introduce the terms “character” and “role model” to your students. Edutopia offers a helpful overview. They use the term “life skill” which can be replaced with “character strength(s)”. When understanding is in place, you can offer opportunities to have students share about role models in their lives. Look to have your students use the language of character strengths specifying the ones they see in their role models.

• Characters in Reading – Use questions and language around individuals and their character strengths in action or inaction.

• Important Figures in Social Studies, Art, Language/Culture, Math and Science… All the Disciplines – Analyze the strengths of the individuals who come up in your study of these disciplines. Create a strength profile for each of them. Use language around how those people exercised their strengths and in some cases could have used other strengths to improve their lives.

• Journal – Teacher provided prompts and student independently writing about personal wellness including strength stories in which students write stories of their strengths in action. These stories can include drawings and photos of the strengths.

• Personal Planner – Read a blog post outlining some ideas on how student planners can support learning not only around the strengths but also in other areas of wellness.

Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash