Embedding Wellness Learning Into Our Delivery Tools

Take a moment to think about the various tools and structures that you use in your teaching. In the elementary school we use student planners, class websites, SeeSaw portfolios, super unit booklets… Each of these tools can be designed to promote our school mission and values, character strengths, yearly learning initiatives and lots more. There are many tools and many ways we can use them in our teaching!

Let’s focus on super unit booklets and student planners. The third grade students are currently working with the essential question of “How can we collaborate to succeed?”. One of the activities in their super unit booklet involves self-reflection with their collaboration efforts. As you can see from the image below, the teachers really continue the learning through the assessment activity. We can see how the students deepen their understanding of the teamwork traits via the inventory.

We also can see the opportunity to embed the character strengths into the teamwork inventory to have students explain how they used their character strengths to support collaboration. Another option could be at the start of the booklet with a worksheet entitled “Which character strengths will you use to support your team?”.

Student planners can be designed to support all sorts of learning outcomes from specific learning standards to year long themes. The teaching of PERMA and character strengths fits in nicely as well. Planner pages can be dedicated to provide content information on the PERMA pillars and the strengths. Embedded enrichment activities can help curious students further their understanding about wellness. Specific days in the calendar can offer reminders for students to review their WOOP goals, to take mindful moments and/or to add to the gratitude wall in the back of the classroom. The opportunities are endless for teachers to engage their character strength of creativity to find ways to support wellness learning in their classrooms.

If you want to take a deeper dive into the possibilities provided by student planners, here is a blog post that offers a few more ideas.