[Part 2] Dimensions of Health Lesson Plans: The Interconnectedness of Health
Hello! And welcome to part two of the Dimensions of Health Lesson Plan series. In the first installment of this series, I shared about the Dimensions of Health Learning Stations and focused on empowering students to foster a basic understanding of each component of health.
In today's post, I am going to highlight students learning how each component connects to the other seven components. To teach my students about the interconnected nature of health, I created this Just Post-it Components of Health activity.
How the Dimensions of Health Post-It activity works:
It all starts with a poster of each component of health. The purpose of each poster is for students to understand how the components of health impact and influence one another. Each poster focuses on one specific component of health and presents guided questions for students to discuss and determine how the various components connect. Here's a breakdown of the poster:
In class, I divided students into groups. Normally, I let kids choose their own partners, but for this activity, I wanted to make sure they were equally paired. In their groups, students read through the guiding questions, discussed the answers, and then wrote how they thought the two stated components of health connected to each other on a Post-It®.
For the most part, I was impressed with the students’ ability to take ownership of their learning and use the guiding questions to make connections. The Spiritual Health group was the only one that struggled. I find that students often get caught up thinking that Spiritual Health equals religion, and that is not true. While religion plays a role, Spiritual Health is about living with purpose and meaning while upholding individual beliefs and values. In the future, I'll use the Spiritual Health poster as an example that we do together as a class.
Final Thoughts
Overall, I was happy with this activity, and I felt like it really helped my sixth graders better understand the interconnected nature of health. Additionally, these posters served as a helpful resource with my seventh and eighth-grade students while they worked on their final project. More on the final project next time.
