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 second mini lesson was self care and we used the picture book “The Good Egg” by Jory John and Pete Oswald as a mentor text. In the first part of our lesson 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. Many of my students did chose to share, and our conversation evolved into a lively discussion of the many strategies people use for self care.