In this course, elementary students between Kindergarten and Grade 3, will be exposed to the world of well-being and mindfulness. Mindfulness is often described as a practice used to understand one’s emotions and learn how to process stressful situations, which can lead to a more positive outlook on life and an improved mood (well-being) (Garai et al, 2023). From our group’s experiences in elementary school, we have not explicitly been taught about the benefits of mindfulness and well-being activities such as Breathing Strategies, Healthy Eating, Social Skills & Communication, Creativity & Play, and Physical Wellbeing.

Our team’s approach in instructing the children is to utilize a behaviorist approach through educational videos, web applications, and worksheets. An example of a completed unit can be found under the “Healthy Eating” section which entails an interactive app, a kid-friendly worksheet package, and educational videos.  Through incorporating inclusion and interactivity in our team’s project, we believe that students will be engaged through technology and thus, find ways to relate to the topics at hand. We are truly excited to share this resource with the world and look forward to your feedback.

Since the target audience for our learning resource is children in kindergarten to grade three most of the rationales given to us during this class such as inquiry, project-based, design thinking, and open pedagogies are not suitable for this age range. However, the direct instruction approach fits well for our topic. We believe that direct instruction is the optimal choice for our interactive resource. Other approaches may present challenges for this age group, as they are still developing their reading skills and may struggle with lengthy texts. Similarly, extensive projects and writing tests may be overwhelming for them, making it difficult for them to comprehend the purpose of each individual subtopic. 

Therefore, direct instruction offers a more focused and manageable approach for our young learners.

Our learning resource, a healthy eating game, employs behaviourism to teach children which foods are healthy and which are unhealthy. Given a stimulus of an image of a food item captioned by its name, students are asked if the presented food is healthy. By playing this game, the stimulus-response process is enforced, habits are formed, and learning occurs. Our learning resource works well for the lower levels of Bloom's taxonomy and will help students remember what foods are good for them and which are not.