Mental health education and hauora for PRIMARY

Teaching interpersonal skills, resilience, and wellbeing

This book is the result of a collaboration between academics at the University of Auckland Waipapa Taumata Rau and teachers in schools. It is an excellent resource for teachers wanting to teach about resilience, mental health, interpersonal skills, and wellbeing.

It contains lesson plans designed to enhance learning to enable primary students to develop knowledge, understandings, and skills in the areas of:

• personal identity
• communication and relationships with others
• wellbeing
• health promotion, action, and activism.

Designed to be used at multiple year and curriculum levels, this book is intended to be most useful for students in Years 1–6 but it can be used with students at higher levels as well. It is up to individual teachers to decide how they might adapt, apply, and use the activities and ideas in this book. For this reason, the authors have not specified particular curriculum links for each activity (links will depend on how you use the ideas and what topics you focus on).

This resource will enhance youth capabilities to understand different cultural perspectives and approaches to mental health, as well as specifically developing skills to enhance resilience, social cohesion, and social justice. This resource was co-written with teachers working in a range of schools with Pacific, Māori, Asian, and Pākehā New Zealand children (and those from other ethnicities). As a result of this process, the resource aims to engage with the diversity of young people in New Zealand schools.