Today, we participated in Green Shirt Day that brings about mental health and well-being awareness.
The Grade 1/2 Busy Bees have been learning all about emotional literacy, self regulation and mental health and wellbeing all year long, and our understanding grows each year. Today, during Children's Mental Health & Awareness week, we spent time solidifying how we should express our feelings and that it is ok to not to be ok all the time. We also spent time discussing what we can do about it as well as recognizing how to help others when they are not in the ‘green' zone.
Exploring feelings, beyond the simple 'happy or sad' responses, helps children really understand what specific feelings can do to our bodies and how to deal with them. Being able to express our feelings with 'I statements' will be a starting point for our wee bees. For example, we will be working on 'I feel _______ because _____________________.'
Here are some various emotions, we may be exploring...
We are understanding that our emotions impact our body. Sometimes we have difficulty controlling our bodies as a result of those feelings. The Zones of Regulation help us to really organize those feelings. When we say we are 'good to go', we are in the green zone and ready to learn.
After our learning today, we decided to create a brainstorm on ways to help us get into the green 'good to go' zone...
One way to be healthy and take care of our mental health is to reduce the amount of screen time. The school's Mental Health and Wellbeing Team challenged each class today to take the pledge and choose not to use devices (as much) as it impacts our body in many different ways. We learned some pretty interesting facts on how screen time impacts our heart, lungs, eyes and brain! We made a commitment and hope at home, we can be held to our promise to reduce the amount of time on devices. We discussed other ways to spend our time. We look forward to our elective activities tomorrow to explore activities that might peek our interest more and get off screens to help with our mental health and wellbeing!
Help us to stay true to our pledge and choose not to use (as much) to help keep our body and minds healthy! Thanks to the school's Mental Health and Well-Being Team for challenging us and for the cool new sunglasses!!
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