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. 

Introduce core SEL competencies to teach students how to practice compassion and empathy, identify emotions, and exercise growth mindset.

Compassion is an important social-emotional skill that begins to develop in early childhood and is essential for lifelong health and success. Learning compassion increases a student's sense of wellbeing and improves the learning environment for all learners. By developing empathy in children, educators lay the groundwork for long-term understanding of diversity, equity and inclusion in the classroom(opens in new tab) and in life. Compassion education is important(opens in new tab) because it helps to build key social-emotional learning competencies, such as:

- development of the understanding of self
- social awareness, and
- relationship skills

With interactive online activities and robust offline lesson plans, The Compassion Project provides invaluable resources for teaching empathy in the classroom. The Lower Elementary Compassion Course has three online lessons; Compassion Playground, EmpathEyes, and Mindful Maze.

Sun West School Division: To access The Compassion Project: Lower Elementary, log into EVERFI through your clever account.

"The Compassion Project is a web-based learning platform focusing on social and emotional learning (SEL) strengths like compassion and empathy. It begins with a tutorial, which students can always access by clicking the help button in the upper left corner. Each lesson starts with a pre-quiz to assess what students already know. After that, a bright and colorful two-minute video with cartoon characters describes the topic for the lesson. Four characters (Tye, Brandon, Alex, and David) narrate the videos in story format. After the video plays, there are reflection questions in the format of a text messenger app that students can click to answer. Characters introduce the SEL skills by describing what the skill (e.g., compassion) looks, sounds, and feels like.

Each skill has three activity lessons. For compassion, students identify when someone needs help and learn how to act with kindness. For empathy, students "see" life through the perspective of different characters. For mindfulness, students practice a breathing technique. Teachers can then provide debriefing and offline extension activities.

The teacher dashboard allows instructors to manage students, add classes, and re-teach when needed. Quiz grades are automatically uploaded and students can access their score by hovering over each lesson." (Common Sense Media)

Sun West School Division: To access The Compassion Project: Upper Elementary, log into EVERFI through your clever account.

"This guide offers two different approaches to teaching Encanto:

1. Show a few specific clips, paired with discussion questions.
2. Show the entire film, paired with a more in-depth lesson plan (below) and handout.

Feel free to use either approach, or even combine the two into one lesson (or an entire unit) based around the movie. If you only have a single class period, it might be ideal to show just a few key clips mentioned below. If you decide to help students delve deeper into the topic, you might show the entire film and have more extensive discussions over multiple days. Of course, you could also use some combination of the two, adapting the lesson to best suit your class's needs."

This lesson and active viewing guide are aligned with CASEL 5 and you can help your students:
*develop interests and a sense of purpose
*show the courage to take initiative
*resist peer pressure
*resolve conflict
*show concern for others' feelings
*reflect on community
*identify solutions

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

"A family yoga practice can be a fun, dynamic way to enjoy moments together that turn into memories. Designed for families and groups of all ages, this 25-minute yoga practice features partner work and imaginative play while teaching the value of connectedness."

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.)

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.

Made by a Grade 4 teacher in Saskatchewan. Kids Boost Immunity (KBI) provides dozens of classroom activities and teacher resources developed by health and education professionals. 

Made by a Grade 5 teacher in Saskatchewan. Kids Boost Immunity (KBI) provides dozens of classroom activities and teacher resources developed by health and education professionals. 

Kids Boost Immunity matches Saskatchewan curriculum outcomes from Grades 4 to 12. You can read a description of the core lessons available for Saskatchewan students. Each grade has a tailored selection of lessons that fit their curricular need.

The Critical Thinking and Evaluating Information lessons on Kids Boost Immunity are aligned with multiple subjects within the Saskatchewan curriculum. These lessons provide examples of how misinformation can sway opinion, often by creating a sense of fear. A checklist evaluation method enables student to assess the trustworthiness of information sources. Other evaluation strategies include learning how to recognize personal bias and using a scientific approach to test ideas. For older grades there are lessons in designing experiments, creating a working hypotheses, exploring biases, and understanding correlation versus causation.

Ages: 8+

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

Videos, Podcasts, Quizzes!
Learn how anything works. It's all here from health, science, home/garden, auto, tech, money, lifestyle, enterainment, adventure, animals and more!

"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."

This website provides short support videos by grade level for:
*readers have different voices
*readers make inferences
*readers retell/summarize
*readers question and predict
*readers track details
*readers juggle multiple texts
*SEL

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

"This collection of Mindful Moments is effective for all ages. At just a few minutes each, these compact recordings are perfect for a break from screen time, a support for transition time, or mindfulness anytime."

3min 50sec