Positive Thinking

As we wrap up the school year, our campus is focused on developing healthy habits so we can make healthy decisions this summer. With all the free time given, our students face more opportunities to make decisions on their own. To prepare them for this, teachers are tasked with teaching an aspect of health for our last week of school. I chose to teach Family and Social Health as well as Nutrition. For our first day, we spoke about self esteem, body image, and how these are affected by both our inner dialogue and society at large. Our class discussions were guided by three videos I shared in class and an artistic activity. The videos were found on youtube: a short film titled Identity by KJ Adams, Girls Aged 6-18 Talk About Body Image by Allure, and What Do Strangers Think Of You by Buzzfeed. Students were so open and responsive to the videos! We had great conversations about how we can be kinder to ourselves and those around us. Each of us were immediately able to relate to the videos. The artistic activity encouraged students to think about how they see their peers and how their peers see them. We reviewed a vocabulary list of positive adjectives to use, cut them out, and walked around to place them on each other's desks. Each student had a blank sheet of paper on their desk with their name at the top as a place mat or canvas to put the words on. Next, we sat down to view which adjectives were placed on our desk, revealing what our classmates thought of us. Students glued the words to their papers in whatever pattern they chose and then answered reflective questions on another handout. I also joined in on the fun, my sheet is pictured in the slideshow below along with the students' work.