This is the second year that I have facilitated the Healthy Start BOB project in my Grade 8 Homeroom class and the third year since its inception. You can read more about last’s year’s experience here. This is something I strategically initiate in January because a new year brings new ideas, new goals ,and new attempts at change. Also, it really makes an impact on my students for several reasons. The project centres around students have to choose something they want to stop or start doing that will contribute to their positive mental, physical, social-emotional or spiritual well being. I got the idea when planning a Health unit. Here is an excerpt from the Healthy Start outline that took from the Ontario Health Curriculum. “Maintaining good mental health and emotional well-being involves balancing the different aspects of life: the physical, intellectual, social, emotional, and spiritual. It involves the ability to think, feel, act, and interact in a way that allows you to enjoy life and cope with challenges that arise,” (pg 197). This project was essentially inspired to help my students develop and use of strategies for relieving stress, caring for their mental health and/or promoting their overall health. As with all of my BOB projects, this also helps students build or consolidate several learning and curricular skills.
Healthy Start asks students to commit to a goal, track it through journaling for 21 days (Steven Covey) , create something to share with the class that reflects their journey, and to collect and display data through a graph or chart of their choice. This is a fun way to integrate the Data Management unit in an authentic and personalizing way. This year’s student goals included:
Healthy eating
Eating breakfast every day
Having a better night’s sleep
Making lists to minimize anxiety and perseveration
Trying to be more positive
Building self esteem
Trying to be more eco-friendly
Learning to meditate/develop a mindfulness practice
Regular exercise
Drawing for release
Increasing productivity
Strategies for Stress reduction
Weight management
Reducing screen time
Their products ranged from slide shows to images to poster boards to videos. Here are some of their products:
Here are some of their graphs that tracked their goals or outcomes:
Journalling
This year, I gave my students time to journal in class, though they could choose how they wanted to do this: voice notes, sketchnotes, vlogging, blogging or handwritten entries. This was also some of the only class time that was given for this project. The only other class time were the presentation options. They could choose from a gallery walk, ors students could choose to sign up to present to the class over the 3 weeks following, with no more than 2 on a given day. The only different criteria for those who chose the gallery walk option was that they required an artist statement so that we could understand how their product reflected their goal without asking them to speak or present. This was especially useful for those who wanted to keep their journey intimate and focus instead on their accomplishments.
My Reflections
While tracking the experience is essential, daily journalling was too big of an ask, as not everyone had something to say every day. I will continue to make class time for this next year, but I will have them journal every other day, instead.
Not everyone achieved their goals, and that was an important learning experience, too. Goal setting is easier than goal attainment. We’ve talked about grit and perseverance over the year, but this was something they had to live to learn from. That’s why I love the reflections on this experience as much as seeing the process and products. So much learning!! Achieving a goal is not always a straight line, and learning what that looks and feels like is a journey that I'm happy to support through this project. This is an image Adam Grant posted recently:
SDome Student Reflections
This is a BOB project that I will use again and again. Beside, it gives me a great opportunity to commit along side them and fail forward, too. This year, I tried to practice gratitude through daily journalling but learned more about being present, instead. You can read more about that in a previous post.
One of the coolest parts of being given the platform to share my work at conferences like BIT2019 was being able to see the impact beyond my classroom. A few teachers tagged me when trying the Healthy Start project in their classrooms. Thank you to Shannon Iossifidis (@edu_iossifidis) from St. Christopher Catholic School in Burlington for sharing this great pic collage of her students' Healthy Start projects.
