“Focus less on how much time kids are spending online and shift your thinking towards how you can help your kid stay emotionally connected to friends, school, clubs and other relationships, online and offline. These social-emotional bonds are their lifeblood right now, and your support is critical.”
6 Ways to Support Kids’ Mental Health Right Now by Caroline Knorr click here
This year I had the opportunity to roll out Second Step lessons during our advisory period on campus. It’s a great social-emotional learning support for teachers and students to learn from together. I stumbled across this resource page which includes resources specific to the current pandemic situation. Here’s the link: COVID-19 Response Resources for Educators and Families
During the remote learning period in our professional learning communities we took some time to read and discuss articles. One of those was titled ‘Teachers, How Can We Care for Our Mental Health Right Now?’. At the time, I wanted to share this video out on social media but I’ll archive it here for future reference as I feel it provides important info for teachers working through this pandemic.
A few notes & quotes…
“…we cannot effectively take care of other people if we are not taking care of ourselves…”
“…their (students) frontal lobes are still developing, leaving them with tons of information but perhaps not a lot of emotional capacity to handle or process this in a healthy way.”
Felt this was important in my interaction with students, especially in providing support and adapting the online learning experience to fit the students needs and lack of resources.
There is a recommendation in this article to consider tactile activity to reduce anxiety or stress including puzzles! I’d recommend coloring as well!
Move your body, keep the blood flowing…I started putting in some effort to creating mini lesson plans for myself to follow and work out to. I have a tendency to prolong workout time. To help stay within time and set specific goals, I started doing some research to create mini-workout lesson plans to target different exercise activities.
Stay strong teachers! Here’s the complete article:
Teach, Love. “Teachers, How Can We Care for Our Mental Health Right Now?” We Are Teachers, www.weareteachers.com/mental-health-during-covid/.