In January...Ride the Changes

 Descriptor:
  • Changes help us grow and learn
  • Skill building and confidence building activities
  • Resolutions, overcoming barriers to challenges
  • Making change
Public Service Announcement:
We challenge you to look at change as possibility.  Let’s see it from a new perspective as an opportunity to grow and learn.
Thought for the Month:
  • “Perhaps we can’t control it but we can learn to ride it … like rapids on a great river.  To take advantage of the flow and use it to take us where we want to go.  To live in uncertainty, and yet act with confidence.” - Dewitt Jones
  • “I can choose to think, feel and act.  No other person makes me feel a certain way.”-Anonymous
  • “There are no unresourceful students, only unresourceful states.” - Anonymous
  • “Change the state and behaviour is changed.” - Anonymous
Suggested Whole School Events/Activities:
  • Plan to have an art show of student generated motivational celebration posters.
  • Make a journal circulate through the school and have individuals make entries on skills being built, resolutions being mastered and .or barriers overcome.
Classroom Activities:
  • Prepare Celebrate buttons or Celebrate calling cards to go out to individuals in the community.
  • Do art work for the Virtual Gallery of Health.
  • Have students write a short story on what new talent they are developing or maybe it is a positive change in their life (New Years resolution) they are working on mastering.
  • Have students develop positive catch words, high five (secret handshake) or gesture unique to Celebrate.
Suggested Reading:
  • Helping Your Kids Cope With Divorce the Sandcastle Way * - M.Gary Neuman
  • Oma’s Quilt (E)** - Paulette Bourgeois
  • Stargirl (M/H)*** - Jerry Spinelli
  • Chrysanthemum (E)*** - Kevin Henkes
  • Wilfred Gordon McDonald Partridge (E)* - Mem Fox
  • It’s Hard to be Five (E)** - Jamie Lee Curtis & Laura Cornell
  • When Bad Thing Happen (Grades 2-4) - Lori Little
  • Some Things Are Scary (E)* - Florence Parry Heide
  • “I Think I Can, I Know I Can!”(E)* - Susan Issacs & Wendy Ritchey, Ph.D.
  • What You Can See You Can Be!  - David Anderson
  • Baseball Ballerina* - Kathryn Cristaldi
*Available in the Provincial Library System http://vision.gnb.ca/welcome.html
**Available at Benjamin Books
Resources:
Supplementary Resources (found in the green hanging file folder):
  • Teachers Guide from the Random Acts of Kindness Foundation (see attached)
  • Mental Health Fitness Tips
  • Celebrate What’s Right with the World DVD by Dewitt Jones & Leader’s Guide (elementary schools may borrow a copy by contacting Sandi McQuinnsandi.mcquinn@gnb.ca or 848-6684).
  • List of Other Recommended Literature
  • Information on 40 Developmental Assets
Web Sites: