With the belief that it’s never too early to support children’s mental wellbeing, a new teaching resource for primary schools, written by educators at Waipapa Taumata Rau, University of Auckland, and primary teachers, has just been published.Based in the Faculty of Education and Social Work, Professors Katie Fitzpatrick and Melinda Webber led the writing, the same pair responsible for the Ministry of Education policy Mental health education: A guide for teachers, leaders and schools’ boards (released in 2022).
The resource – which helps schools implement the Ministry of Education guidelines – features 74 content-rich lesson plans in key areas like identity, mana, interpersonal skills and communication.It’s been substantially adapted to suit a younger age group from an original resource – 300 pages of lesson plans on how to teach mental health aimed at intermediate and secondary – already being widely used in high schools, says Professor Fitzpatrick.“So many primary schools were using and adapting it, the publishers kept saying it would be good to do a primary version.”
