The Teaching of Wellness – PRIME Instructional Activities and Strategies #4

This post continues the series focusing on teaching and integrating wellness into the culture of our classes. These prime activities and strategies work for the teaching of all the character strengths. They are designed for elementary school but they can be adapted for MS and HS.

• Mind Maps – Students work to build their understanding by first listing all of the strengths as nodes. They then add branches to add notes, images, videos, etc. that offer examples of their understanding of each strength. This mind map construction can be accomplished through mind mapping apps, websites and/or paper. Besides building understanding of what each strength is, students can also construct a mind map that shows their application of the strengths. They can add branches describing the ways they engage with each strength. At the end of the school year students can review their understanding of the strengths and examples of engagement for the sake of self-reflection and to possibly create a project to communicate their “living” the strengths.

• Portfolios – Portfolios can be leveraged to support the delivery of wellness (healthy living) guidelines, learning activities and responses, reflection opportunities, goal-setting, etc. Parents can be prompted to interact with their child’s portfolio wellness posts that engage them in their child’s wellness and potentially of the entire family. Students add entries and artifacts of living their strengths. A key component of the portfolio can be the “strength profile” section. This is where students have a graphic organizer listing their signature, phasic and lessor strengths. A helpful connection is to bring in the WOOP goal-setting tool for students to plan how they will engage with their strengths during the coming school year. Students can use a tagging system when they add artifacts and reflections into their portfolio (ex. #creativity #curiosity). This allows for easy access to see specific strength entries over time. Portfolios also provide a natural formative and summative assessment tool.

• Role Plays – Teacher and student created scenarios of the strengths and PERMAH pillars in action to be acted out.

Images: Mind Map | Portfolio | Role Plays