"Mental health includes our emotional, psychological, and social well-being. It affects how we think, feel, and act. It also helps determine how we handle stress, relate to others, and make choices. Mental health is important at every stage of life, from childhood and adolescence through adulthood" ("What is Mental Health").
In many cultures, seeking help for mental health is thought of as a weakness, but the truth is recognizing and getting assistance for your social and emotional well-being is an incredibly brave act. Seeking mental strength, especially during a time of grievance is an important development tool. Whether we are going through a challenging time now or inevitably one we will face in the future, it is important we learn about the cycles of grief and discover tools to help us manage them. In this studio we will learn about mental health and ways to ensure it becomes and stays a priority in our lives.
In this studio you will earn your credit by completing assignments and performance tasks. You will work your way through each one gaining knowledge and understanding of several of the ELA competencies. These competencies are then graded and contribute to your grade for the course. The following competencies will be assessed in this studio:
ELA 1 Reading Critically
ELA 2 Writing Effectively: Informational
ELA 3 Collaborative Discussion
ELA 4 Conducting Research
Milestone 1 is focused around developing reading and comprehensions skills. We will do this by reading a book called A Monster Calls. In this milestone you will complete four assignments and two performance tasks. The assignments will prepare you to complete the performance tasks and earn your competency ratings. This milestone will help develop your understanding of tools that can be used to create a better understanding of a text and the deliberate choices an author makes to create an intended purpose.
Milestone 2 is centered around collaborative discussion. In this milestone you will learn what it takes to have an academic conversation, as well as practice having one with a peer. The discussion will be centered around what you learned in Milestone 1 and applying it to your reading of A Monster Calls. In the collaborative discussion you will take a stance on specific aspects of the book and need to support and defend your perspective. You will also need to learn to actively listen, consider, and respond to both agreeing and disagreeing perspectives that will be shared.
Milestone 3 is the first step in creating an informational document that centers around mental health and/or grief. In this section you will learn how to assess sources to determine their viability as well as collecting data from reliable sources to use for your informational paper. It is important that we learn to consider the source, to determine its credibility rather than take information as it is delivered. Especially in the world today, information comes to use in a wide variety of ways: social media, news, blogs, and individuals. We must learn to determine if we should take the information for face value or disregard the information based on the credibility and viability of the source. This milestone will help you do that. It will also help you create questions and ways to organize information to be able to use in the next milestone.
In this final milestone you will learn about the writing techniques demonstrated with the informational genre, as well as, implementing them into your informational paper. The final piece will be a paper you create for your peers as to focus on one's mental health or ways to help deal with grief. We will turn the collection of texts into a mini book to have available for anyone struggling with these issues. Although this milestone only has 2 performance tasks, embedded in them are 6 different competencies.
Grievance: a grievance is a wrong or hardship suffered, real or supposed, which forms legitimate grounds of complaint.
Inevitable: certain to happen; unavoidable.
Deliberate: done consciously and intentionally.
Intended: planned or meant.
Assess: evaluate or estimate the nature, ability, or quality of.
Sources: the place or person in which information was collected.
Viability: having a reasonable chance of succeeding.
Reliable: able to be believed : likely to be true or correct
Credibility: worthy of belief.
Implementing: carry out or accomplish.
Embedded: able to be believed : likely to be true or correct