Tau’olunga Mai
Tau’olunga is a traditional Tongan dance. This embodied activity helps children bring awareness to their surroundings and connections through song and dance. You are welcome to adapt this activity to a dance/song from your culture. This can be incorporated as a daily practice to support students to foster a mind-body connection and ground to the…
Read MoreWhat Is Hope?
This learning sequence is designed to help children (and teachers) gain greater insight into the notion of hope. The sequence begins with the educator sharing a picture book or short animated film. The educator then employs the teacher in role convention and acts as one of the characters from the book/film. The sequence concludes with…
Read MoreThe Home Within Me
This activity offers opportunities for children to rediscover their sense of place by connecting to self and community. This lesson offers a simple sharing circle to incorporate into daily practice to support children to rebuild their sense of place in response to losing their home/community due to natural disaster. There are options for how to…
Read MoreNavigating the Waves
This activity offers a space where students can contemplate emotional and physical responses to help navigate the circumstances they are experiencing. They do this while creating imagery that encourages them to identify what will help them cultivate a sense of resilience and self regulation as they move forward. Students will create a collage (collaborative or…
Read MoreThe Long and Short Of It
This lesson sequence uses the visual arts to support students in re-connecting with people in their class and starting to explore emotions post a traumatic/crisis event. The approach outlined also encourages the development of creative dispositional qualities that support positive mental wellbeing. In this unit, students will explore and experiment with using the visual arts…
Read MoreSuperpower Poetry Fun
Seeing ourselves as powerful again after a crisis is an important part of imagining our way out of the trauma of the experience. This poetry unit starts by recognising we all have a ‘why’. Knowing it is key to our wellbeing. This set of writing processes helps students figure out their ‘why’ in a creative,…
Read MoreAlone together
Students return to school after a crisis with different experiences. Dance can help students share their stories while seemingly focusing on something else. This dance work helps students focus on their own time away from school in the crisis and see that others will have experienced similar and different things. This unit of work was…
Read MoreThe Magic Seashell
OVERARCHING VALUES: VALUING PASIFIKA WAYS OF BEING AND KNOWING – WITH AND FOR ALL PEOPLE Experiencing this learning should be savoured by all, so allow good time for each part. Remember that this is about relationships – so really encourage the talanoa. Make alongside the students where you can. In your talk and making, share…
Read MoreRegulating Robot
A drama about social rules, morals and creativity This drama gives students the opportunity to explore the necessity for social regulation, the risks and consequences of both making and breaking rules, and the relationship between rules and regulations on the one hand, and creativity and freedom on the other. It also explores how the impact…
Read MoreTwo Stars and a Wish
This dance work is a way for students to express their thinking about having been in isolation. This is a physical way of thinking about the good and possibly hard things about having been in isolation. While this lesson plan was initially created and used for returning to education post COVID-19 lockdowns, it can be…
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