This article explains 6 ways to use breathing for stress relief and mental wellness.

"Learning skills to support our mental health early in life can provide significant benefits to our physical, emotional, and social growth for life. For example, for children to choose calm in times of stress, they first need the opportunity to experience calm and practice arriving at a calm state.

All of the tools you find in this toolkit help cultivate calm, mental health, and overall well being. In this resource, learn 9 yoga and mindfulness practices for mental health that are suitable for a variety of settings and time frames: each tool may be as brief as 1 minute or expanded as needed.

Use the tools individually or all together to tailor your own experience, now and for the long term."

*Counting Breath
*Core Breath
*Yoga Poses at Desk
*Brain Break
*Relaxation

You will need to share your email to download the guide.

This resource contains an abundance of ELA infused, cross-curricular lessons organized by themes for Grades 4, 5 and 6. Non-fiction, poetry and fiction reading lessons are all included. 

Eat Well Saskatchewan – Free Nutrition Services for Families, Educators and Policy Makers.

This unit plan overview provides links to all lessons along with links to accompanying teacher support materials that include: video links, student worksheets and answer guides for individual lessons, Inquiry activities with support materials for 5 lessons on climate change and how we can work towards slowing its progress. Also includes the inquiry lesson of developing a student's own action plan.

Students have access to a number of courses in the area of:

*Social & Emotional Learning
*Financial Education
*Health & Wellness
*College & Career Readiness
*Early Learning

Sun West students - ask your teacher to add you to a course! Currently we access Everfi via the Clever portal. Leila Pullum (lpullum@everfi.com) is here to respond to student and teacher support questions, so please don’t hesitate to reach if you need help.

NEW courses are being added regularly.

ECE- K-3
Word Force
Healthier Me Jr
Compassion Project

Elementary/Middle 4-8
Vault
Healthier Me Middle School
Hockey Scholar Math & Science
Endeavour STEM Career Exploration
Ignition Digital Safety & Citizenship
Character Playbook
Venture Entrepreneurship
Mental Wellness Basics

High Schools 9-12
Mental Wellness Basics
Venture Entrepreneurship
AlcoholEdu
Prescription Drug Safety
Marketplaces
EVERFI Financial Literacy
Honour Code

Give your eyes a break with this audio-only Digital Wellness Break. Follow along as teacher Stephanie's voice guides you step-by-step through "Tense and Release," a mind-body-breath integration that's designed for children and effective for all ages.

TODAY’S MINDFUL MOVEMENT
🦦 TENSE AND RELEASE 🦦

“It’s the end of a very long day. Back-to-back-to-back meetings. You sign-off from work, gather your belongings, rush out the door... only to get stuck in traffic. Tension rises.

A busy lifestyle with no time to relax can lead to frustration, tension, and chronic stress.

Making time in our busy days to mindfully unwind can help. Tense and Release is one of our favorite relaxation exercises to do just this. By consciously tensing and releasing our bodies, we are able to tune out what is going on outside and tune in to what’s going on inside. And in tune, consciously let go of the tension and stress we carry.

This audio-only relaxation will allow you to return to a state of balance. Just hit 'play' and give your eyes a rest for the next four minutes.” (Yoga Ed.)

The choices students learn to make when they’re young can have a lasting impact on their lifetime well-being, happiness, and academic success. But 96% of elementary schools are unable to provide daily physical education.

EVERFI’s Healthier Me is an innovative, games-based elementary school health curriculum that educates elementary school students about the importance of well-balanced meals and physical activity. These elementary health lesson plans prepare students to make healthy, informed decisions when it comes to nutrition and fitness, securing a healthier and happier future for the next generation.

This course could easily be extended to having students create an action plan (Health Education DM and AP outcomes) based on what they have learned in this course.

Sun West School Division: log into this EVERFI course through your clever account.

The choices students learn to make when they’re young can have a lasting impact on their lifetime well-being, happiness, and academic success. But 96% of elementary schools are unable to provide daily physical education. EVERFI’s Healthier Me is an innovative, games-based digital course that educates elementary school students about the importance of well-balanced meals and physical activity, preparing them to make healthy, informed decisions when it comes to nutrition and fitness and securing healthier, happier futures for the next generation.

This Course Covers
Making healthy decisions
Eating well-balanced meals
Nutritional properties of foods
Benefits of physical activity
Balancing strength, endurance, and flexibility

CoordiKids is happy to offer the series of downloadable tools for teachers: The How Do You Feel? Curriculum for teaching self-regulation to children.

How Do You Feel? is a curriculum designed for elementary school teachers. The kit is geared toward helping children ranging in ages from 4-12.

What’s Included: The How Do You Feel? Curriculum from CoordiKids
- The “How Do You Feel?” Chart
- 6 Lesson Plans
- Visual Aids
- Worksheets
- And more!

By clicking on the "Home" tab, you will also find:
- Home Course
- Preschool Course
- Classroom Brain Break Course
- Homeschool Brain Break Course
- Master Classes
- Starter Packs (Sensory Processing and Dyspraxia)

The Children’s Health and Well-being Measure (ACHWM) is a tool that gives Indigenous communities and organizations an overview of the health and well-being of children and youth in their communities.

The measure offers insight into children's Spiritual, Emotional, Physical, and Mental wellness.

The survey is completed on a tablet that engages children and acts as a catalyst for honest conversation. The results are shared with each child or youth in a visual form on the Balance Chart.

Pixar's "Inside Out" is a movie that's all about feelings, and this makes it perfect for sparking discussions with kids about social and emotional learning. Since the central characters all embody a different emotion, students learn to see parts of themselves or their experiences in each character.

As we know, watching a movie can involve way more than just watching. Use the "Inside Out Movie Guide" (with lesson materials) to explore how joy and sadness can come together and make sense of the mess of our emotions.

(Grades 3–6)

***Sun West teachers can access the movie Inside Out using ACF Streaming.

Ages: 8+

Coping with stress is a skill we need to teach at school across a wide breadth of subjects.

"Let it Ripple is a non-profit film and idea studio. We produce films, original series, and live and virtual experiences that inspire audiences to think about what it means to be human in today's world."

Mental Wellness Basics introduces students to concepts related to mental health and wellness. Stigma associated with mental health can have serious and negative impacts on help-seeking behaviors, and many mental health conditions and symptoms can be significantly lessened through prevention. As such, the lessons in this course focus on:

Supporting students in identifying threats to mental health early, and taking measures to increase factors that protect mental health.
Introducing students to the experiences of others in order to develop awareness and empathy, reduce stigma, and provide facts on the prevalence and symptoms of mental health conditions.
Fostering a mental health mindset to help students develop feelings of self-efficacy and skills that promote and model advocacy for self and others.

This Course Covers
Self Awareness
Self Management
Relationship Skills
Social Awareness
Responsible Decision-Making

Here, you’ll find a resource of simple, step-by-step instructions on how to deal with symptoms related to specific anxiety disorders as well general strategies — such as how to get a good night’s sleep or how to deal with uncertainty in your daily life.

Take time to relax, recharge, and remember your strengths with these fun coloring pages.

Sayings include: I Believe in Me, Breath in Courage Exhale Doubt, I Can Do Hard Things, Don't Give Up! I Can Do This!, It's All Going to be Okay

Check out the great connected lessons that accompany the coloring pages, as well as many other resources.

Check out these great video/curricular resources for Grade 4. The ROVER videos all indicate the curriculum outcomes that they address.

ROVER (Recommended Online Video Education Resources) is a video streaming service for Saskatchewan teachers and students in the PreK-12 education system. It is managed and maintained by the Saskatchewan Ministry of Education. ROVER is a video-on-demand service that provides teachers and students with the convenience of immediate access to streamed, educational videos that support curricula.

This site also offers all of the curriculum documents for all grade levels.

If you are unable to access the site, it may be because a Saskatchewan Ministry of Education Blackboard login is required. All students have an Edonline account, so contact your child's school or the Ministry of Education’s Support Desk at 1-866-933-8333 or email at networkservices@gov.sk.ca for login information. Your child's student number will be required.

The Ready, Check, Go! Series is a physical activity tracker designed to help children and their parents/guardians understand the importance and enjoyment of incorporating regular daily physical activity in ways that suit their personal beliefs and needs.

The Ready, Check, Go! Series includes:
- Participant/Student Workbook to track physical activity (ages 9-11 and 12-14), and Leader/Teacher, and Parent Guides
- Activities to promote the importance of participating in regular physical activity
- Goal setting worksheets to help enhance physical activity behaviours
- Inclusive activities for children of all abilities

The objective of this program is to help children, youth and their parents/guardians understand the importance of regular physical activity; their current physical activity behaviours; and strategies to help them engage in more physical activities. This knowledge can help increase the amount of physical activity children and youth engage in, value and enjoy, in ways that suit their personal beliefs and needs. Specifically, the Ready, Check, Go! is a learning activity to help children aged 9-14 discover more about:
- How physically active they are on typical day;
- The different types of activities they undertake, when, and for how long;
- The intensity (moderate- to vigorous) of their physical activity;
- Identifying ways that they can be more active.

Register with PHE Canada for free access to this resource.

Follow the link to the Google Play or Apple Store to download the Release App for Mindfulness. This app was created by Keynote Speaker Trinna Markusson at iLearn & SWTA for 2020.

"This new wellness app incorporates mindfulness and tapping techniques to help empower you to begin to deal with daily stress, difficult emotions and limiting beliefs that can hold you back from living your best life! With categories for adults, teens, kids, classroom use and a special high-performance category for athletes, Release can help you to stay present and to live with more peace and ease."

For more information visit (copy and paste into a browser) - http://www.presentmomentliving.ca/