Thursday, December 22, 2016

Healthy Living Resources

As you plan for this month's lesson, the following resources and ideas might be helpful.


Slides in Powerpoint and in PDF formats.
Click here for this month's family newsletter in English and here for the newsletter in Spanish.
Click here for the link to the 2016-17 Classroom Champions Planning Manual to find even more resources on Healthy Living from pages 21-24!
This month's video lesson may contain several big points:
  1. What Healthy Living  embodies:
    1. Nutrition and hydration
    2. Sleep
    3. Exercise
    4. Saying no to underage drinking
    5. For olders: Body image
  1. Exploring Healthy Living:
    1. Vocabulary
    2. How to engage
    3. Healthy Living in Action
    4. Healthy Living on the Page
    5. For your own learning
  1. A challenge to the students that may include:
    1. Set a short term goal regarding a healthy choice with nutrition, sleep, or activity level.
    2. Involve their families in making a healthy choice with them -- trying a new physical activity together, trying a new fruit or vegetable, getting to bed a little earlier, or talking about underage drinking. Each student might be asked to report back to the class about how it went.
You may want to prepare for watching the video lesson by:
  1. Planning for vocabulary development as needed
  2. Preparing a Frayer model to make Fair Play more concrete by creating examples and non-examples of Perseverance. Click here to view an example of a Frayer Model.
There will be lots of information that will be helpful in planning this topic below. Please pick and choose what works best for you and your students. Texts will be at the bottom of this blog entry.
Vocabulary Development
Healthy Living is a big contributing factor in how well your brain learns. This vocabulary may not be new for your students but this can be an opportunity to help them find ways to make it relevant in their lives and to include their family and friends as they explore ways to engage with healthy living in their daily lives.
Quotes about health from Brainy Quotes. Be careful with quote collections around health! Many meme collections are more along the line of promoting unhealthy habits, like exercising so a person deserves to eat. Scary stuff.
How to Engage in Healthy Living:
Healthy Living is a choice that is made multiple times everyday, be mindful of the resources students in your community have access to when exploring viable options for a healthier lifestyle. As noted above, despite access to certain resources, once of the basics of Healthy Living is the ability to make good decisions.


It is very helpful to learn how to read labels and have awareness about the ingredients in your food. This can be highlights in core subjects such as Math for calorie counting, English for defining what some of the lengthy terms mean, Science to learn more about what makes up certain ingredients, and Social Studies to learn where some ingredients originate.
  • Choose My Plate – US gov resource
  • Daily Mail Article: What school lunches look like around the world (scroll past big zombie banner ad at the top prior to making screen live for kids) Here's another link to an article about this via BuzzFeed (no zombies, but less explanation).
  • Seedmap.org See where foods come from.
  • Hungry Planet A photo book about who eats what and where. Food as cultural exchange might be a nice way to integrate nutrition and social studies.
  • The Sandwich Swap was recommended during our planning meeting.
  • Several extension services or farmers markets that offer monthly tastings in the schools. Please do a search for this in your geographic area. The Food Trust in the Camden, NJ area is an example of one such program.
Hydrate


Up to 60% of the human adult body is water! According to H.H. Mitchell, Journal of Biological Chemistry 158, the brain and heart are composed of 73% water, and the lungs are about 83% water. The skin contains 64% water, muscles and kidneys are 79%, and even the bones are watery: 31%.


Sleep


School aged children need 10 hours of sleep per night. Only 59% of kids grades 6-8 are getting that. –American Academy of Pediatrics survey.


Exercise
It’s important to incorporate fun and play into exercise! It can help take the mind off the sore muscles :)


Saying no to underage drinking
You know your community and your students the best. Many Student Athlete Mentors will talk about this, please navigate this topic as you see fit.


For olders: Body image
Please know your community before exploring these resources. Some ideas about body image were requested by some of our middle school teachers last year.
  • Tread carefully on health quotes online. Many are disguised pro-eating disorder or encourage super unrealistic body images, often called Fitspo. If you have older students who might be looking at these unrealistic memes online, Buzzfeed did a really funny talk back to them. Find it here. Learn why Fitspo is dangerous in this Huffington Post article.
  • Learn about the thigh gap trend in teens, and why it has to stop in this article.
  • A round-up of body positive social media campaigns here. You might be familiar with Dove's Real Beauty campaign, six-minute video here about forensic artist who makes drawings of people based on their own overly critical descriptions. Or this one, where women chose between a door that labels them beautiful or not.
  • Not only women struggle with body image. This photo project shows that "ideal" male bodies are really culturally specific. An honest article from a man about poor body image, and reactions to that article curated by him afterwards (Both from Huffington Post)
Healthy Living on the Page:
For Your Learning:
  • Drop Dead Healthy: One man's humble quest for bodily perfection (Goodreads) Write AJ Jacobs is known for documenting his experimental learning projects (like reading the entire encyclopedia in a year, or living according to various interpretations of Biblical law for a year). In this book, Jacobs tackles everything from diet trends to alternative toilet seats. Laugh out loud funny in parts. Related TED Talk "How Living Healthy Almost Killed Me" here.
  • A US government produced film from the 1950s about healthy eating. Ralph is a picky eater, and the soundtrack clearly has an opinion about that (cue villain music). Ralph has no pep.
  • Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution is a cookbook (a really good one), a movement, and was a tv show briefly. He rails against the fact that few people know how to cook any more (especially low income people) and that American school lunches are worse than prison food. Twenty-one minute TED talk here. Pardon his swearing. He's English, and admits that he is ranting because he is so upset.
  • NPR did an interesting story about cooking classes for English Language Learner adults, which is a really innovative way to connect culture and language. Link here.
  • How Poor Sleep Impacts Mental Health in Students: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DQ1ZRN9Gog
  • CBS coverage Teens Pay the price for lack of sleep: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/teens-pay-price-for-lack-of-sleep/

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Perseverance Resources

As you plan for this month's lesson, the following resources and ideas might be helpful.


Slides in Powerpoint and in PDF formats.
Click here for this month's family newsletter in English and here for the newsletter in Spanish.

Click here for the link to the 2016-17 Classroom Champions Planning Manual to find even more resources on Perseverance pages 25-28!
This month's video lesson may contain several big points:
  1. What Perseverance embodies:
    1. Bounce back stronger after failure
    2. Welcome challenges, and “fail forward”
    3. Remain positive when faced with adversity
    4. Develop a "no quit" spirit while pursuing goals
  2. Different ways to demonstrate Perseverance
  3. Exploring Perseverance:
    1. Vocabulary
    2. People
    3. Failure
    4. Welcoming Struggle
  4. A challenge to the students that may include:
    1. Reflect on a time when they gave up, and what might have happened if they had used perseverance.
    2. Think of a time when they overcame a challenge. Describe that to a classmate, and to the mentor.
    3. Make a mantra to use for encouraging yourself and others when you need to persevere.

You may want to prepare for watching the video lesson by:
  1. Planning for vocabulary development as needed
  2. Preparing a Frayer model to make Fair Play more concrete by creating examples and non-examples of Perseverance. Click here to view an example of a Frayer Model.

There will be lots of information that will be helpful in planning this topic below. Please pick and choose what works best for you and your students. Texts will be at the bottom of this blog entry.
Vocabulary Development
Perseverance is a new word for many bigs and littles. Kate Pereira, Education Coordinator for Canada, offered an excellent example of how to teach perseverance. After introducing the word she took her students ice skating as a way to teach the meaning of perseverance through experience.

Perseverance Demonstrated in Videos:
  1. To explore examples of perseverance by viewing Steve’s Ted Talk where he explains how he perseveres through his doubts to achieve his goal.
  2. This year for the first time the Rio Olympics 2016 game there will be the Refugee Olympics Team. These refugees have no home, no team, no flag, no national anthem. Check this link to learn more.
  3. Taco Bell offers the Live Mas scholarship, an opportunity to help students who want to persevere through their dreams. Click here to see Justin’s story about following and working towards his dream of becoming a writer and how the Liva Mas scholarship helped Justin and others like him.
Failure and Welcoming Struggle:
  1. A blog post from a math teacher who utilized this bulletin board in her class to help students use language to use positive framing when speaking about their ability.
  2. Common Sense Media- Self Control: Having self-control (some prefer the term "self-regulation") is about appropriately managing your thoughts, feelings, and impulses. It starts with being mindful of yourself and others and working toward a high emotional intelligence. So much of the way we use technology today challenges the idea of restraint, from tweeting in anger to posting for "likes."
  3. Kids might find it useful to collect catchphrases, or to make their own mantras to overcome doubting self talk.

Other great Perseverance Resources:
  1. Here is a way to inspire students to push through the challenges of the writing process. Write the World offers competitions encouraging students to dig deeper into the writing process with the understanding that a first draft is never perfect, they allow students to have the chance to receive peer and expert feedback before submitting their final piece.
  2. Learning a second language can be celebrated as well. An article about the benefits of knowing more than one language as a student for context.
  3. Grit Curriculum Lesson: The Perseverance Walk- Students are asked to interview people in their own lives about a time when they had to battle through something to reach a goal. The curriculum includes a tip sheet for how to interview and examples of a finished product.

Lesson Ideas:
  1. Allow students to create a list of excuses that they can toss into the trash or in the shredder.
  2. Practice perseverance with a STEM inspired teamwork challenge. Each student will need a toilet paper tube, and the class will need a single marble. Challenge the students to get the marble from one end of the classroom to the other, without it stopping, or hitting the floor. Make the task more challenging by adding obstacles and requiring the marble to go over, under, or around objects. During the challenge you may stop to discuss strategies that work well and how students react when they don’t reach the goal.
  3. Have a quick minute? Get students excited, working together, and ready to refocus on curriculum by playing some ‘Minute to Win It’ games throughout the day. These games are an awesome opportunity to get silly, stick with something challenging, and reinforce good sportsmanship principles!
  4. Challenge your students to spend this month learning that new skill. You may offer time in class for them to research the tools and background knowledge they will need or help them pair up with an expert mentor (maybe a classmate, older student, or family member) who can support them. Have them keep a journal as they undertake this process and document their successes, failures, and obstacles. Students can showcase their awesome new skills!
  5. Flex your STEM muscles and try something new - learn basic coding and create your story, game, or animation for your friends and classmates to watch and play. We can guarantee it won’t be easy, and might not work the first time, but when it does, it will be so worth it!


Book Resources: Be sure to check the Planning Manual for more examples!
  1. Pop! The Invention of Bubble Gum- Bubble-blowing kids everywhere will be delighted with Megan McCarthy's entertaining pictures and engaging fun facts as they learn the history behind the pink perfection of Dubble Bubble.
  2. Wilma Unlimited- Before Wilma was five years old, polio had paralyzed her left leg. Everyone said she would never walk again. But Wilma refused to believe it. Not only would she walk again, she vowed, she'd run. And she did run--all the way to the Olympics, where she became the first American woman to earn three gold medals in a single olympiad.
  3. Very Good Lives offers J.K. Rowling’s words of wisdom for anyone at a turning point in life, asking the profound and provocative questions: How can we embrace failure? And how can we use our imagination to better both ourselves and others?
  4. 11 Experiments That Failed- Is it possible to eat snowballs doused in ketchup—and nothing else—all winter? Can a washing machine wash dishes? By reading the step-by-step instructions, kids can discover the answers to such all-important questions along with the book's curious narrator.

A few interesting resources for you as a learner:
  1. Article about the misconceptions about Growth Mindset.
  2. Here is an article to a helpful list of how to incorporate Growth Mindset into your classroom environment.
  3. Inspired by the popular mindset idea that hard work and effort can lead to success, Mindsets in the Classroom provides educators with ideas for building a growth mindset school culture, wherein students are challenged to change their thinking about their abilities and potential. With the book's step-by-step guidance on adopting a differentiated, responsive instruction model, teachers can immediately use growth mindset culture in their classrooms.
  4. In How Children Succeed, Paul Tough argues for a very different understanding of what makes a successful child. Drawing on groundbreaking research in neuroscience, economics, and psychology, Tough shows that the qualities that matter most have less to do with IQ and more to do with character: skills like grit, curiosity, conscientiousness, and optimism.


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