It didn’t take long before my teaching partner and I discovered that the students we were remote teaching really needed some support around mental health topics. To respond to this we started developing mental health ‘mini lessons” that paired together read alouds, and writing prompts. These mini lessons inspired so much discussion and reflection that I thought we’d share them here for other teachers to use!

The topic of the third mini lesson was vulnerability and trust, and we used the picture book “The Cool Bean” by Jory John and Pete Oswald as a mentor text. This lesson followed a similar format as previous mini lesson on “The Good Egg”. However in this lesson we introduced researcher and storyteller, Brene Brown’s theory on how trust is earned. To learn more about her theory, check out this video. We used the slide below, and a jar of marbles to illustrate the process of how people in our own lives earned (or lost) our trust, and were able to add (or lose) marbles from our jar of trust.

Next, we introduced the following t-chart “thinking frame”. We discussed the t-chart prior to reading, encouraging students to fill it in while the read aloud was occurring. We also stopped at various points through out the read aloud to remind our students to stop and add something to the chart.

When we were done the read aloud, we invited students to share the things they had written in their t -chart. Once we had covered the entries into the t-chart, we introduced writing prompt found below:

After approximately 5 minutes of writing, I invited students to share what they wrote. Sharing is rarely mandatory in my remote learning class, and students have the choice to share what they wish, using either the chat function or by unmuting their mics and speaking. Some of my students did chose to share, and our conversation was a carefully worded one, where we spoke in generalities so as not to invade anyone’s privacy.

The next day in class furthered our thinking on this topic, and learned about Brene Brown’s concept of the “Square Squad”. To learn more about her theory, check out this resources from Brene Brown. We started by sharing this provocation:

We followed up the provocation with this:

And then introduced this writing prompt:

After approximately 5 minutes of writing, I invited students to share what they wrote. Sharing is rarely mandatory in my remote learning class, and students have the choice to share what they wish, using either the chat function or by unmuting their mics and speaking. Many of my students did chose to share, and our conversation included a discussion of how many of included animals, friend, and family members in our square squad.