This source is a list of books on anxiety for students in elementary school and starting at number 13 books for middle schoolers! There is a variety of books listed and each one has a little blurb on what they are about. If these books are read to students or read by students hopefully students with anxiety cope with their anxiety and students without anxiety learn to be more empathetic to those with anxiety. Some recommendations are to use any strategies in the books with the students.

Homework is often a contributing factor to students' mental health struggles. Homework can cause anxiety and even depression. In this TikTok, a teacher shares their opinion on why they do not believe homework should be mandatory. First, the teacher points out students have different home lives which will affect if their homework is complete or how it is completed. He also addresses the time commitment of homework. 

Creating a gratitude journal is a great way to incorporate mental health into the classroom. Anyone can have a gratitude journal but this website focuses on gratitude journals for students. It includes three tabs that discuss how a teacher can plan to use a gratitude journal including the amount of time and materials used. It also has information on how to use gratitude journals with students such as how to introduce the topic by starting with explaining the feeling of gratitude and giving some examples of when we might feel it. It also includes some tips for writing and reflecting for both the students and teachers. 

(The second photo is a link to another source that includes gratitude journal prompts and worksheets.)

Teaching through a social-emotional learning lens is a great way to help student's mental health. This article discusses how to incorporate social-emotional learning into English language arts classes. Though this article is geared to elementary grades it is still possible to use these ideas in older grades simply by changing the text to something more advanced. This article discusses how drama and cooperation, dance and feelings, music and empathy, and visual arts and perspective-taking are all ways to bring social-emotional learning into the classroom. One class activity in this article is showing the students a picture of a character and then having them write from their perspective. This is definitely an activity I would like to do with my future students. I would choose a character from a text we are discussing in class, maybe a character we have not heavily discussed. The activity will not only help them gain a better understanding and larger perspective of the text the character is from but it will also help students build empathy. This can lead to students having more empathy for each other in any situation including mental health struggles.

This article focuses on the importance of mental health in schools and how reading can help improve mental health. The author remembers feeling impacted by books and discussions on mental health in their school and how they learned they had a voice and power through this. The positives of reading for fun are also mentioned in this article. Not all students will want to read for fun but hopefully, they will be able to enjoy English class. I hope to achieve this in my future classrooms by connecting as much class material as possible to students. This will hopefully motivate them to read and write. The article suggests having class discussions on mental health when relevant to texts being read in class. I hope to do this in my future classrooms. I also intend to have full conversations, making sure to not rush any conversations because of time. I want to make sure each student is heard and is reflecting on the discussion. I want to help encourage my future students to care about their mental health and not have a stigma about it.

Hearing the perspective of a young student is a great way to gain a better understanding of how students may feel. Of course, each student is different but I was able to have a quick conversation with my younger sister on homework and its effects on her mental health which I am sure others can relate to. I started the discussion with a broad question, "What are your views on homework?" She responded saying, "Well I think it's unnecessary. We go to school eight hours a day isn't that enough?" I also asked her if homework has an effect on her mental health which she responded saying, "Absolutely yes, it has a negative effect on my mental health. It just causes more and more problems for me to do. I don't need everybody bugging me, my sisters, my parents, my teachers, literally everybody, my friends." It is true that I as well as my parents ask her about her homework and try to help her complete it but I understand the toll this takes and I am working on taking a step back from the homework discussion. My sister continued saying, "It (homework) makes everything so much harder" iterating again, "we spend enough time at school. When we get home don't you think we should be able to sleep or relax?" Just as the teacher in the TikTok earlier on this page recognized that time is valuable young students do as well. If homework is not benefitting students and feeding negative mental health there should be a change in giving homework to help benefit students. When I asked my sister to think about English homework specifically she said it does cause anxiety in her classroom, her English class is the worst. English is the worst for her because that is the class she gets the most homework in and takes up most of her time. She is left to finish classwork and homework that is assigned leaving her stressed.

(Picture picked by my sister!)