In our opinion, as future teachers, working and developing these three points is fundamental. If talking about schools, they doesn’t work with these aspects at all, and if they do, they only focus their attention into corporal health.
So, to know how to work properly with these topics, firstly we must understand their meanings:
Mental health is the balance status between a person and its sociocultural surroundings, that warrantees ones intellectual and working participation, and promotes social relations to achieve a well-being and a good standard of living.
Corporal health is based on physical well-being, taking care about the absence of diseases and infections and the amount of physical activity an individual does.
In addition, social health is the ability that someone has to maintain healthy social relations with the family, friends, neighbours, colleagues, etc.
So, our idea is that, by means of many practices as mindfulness or relaxing techniques, the teacher can help the students to improve these three aspects. There are many objectives we can achieve using this methods at class or at home:
- To be conscious about the body and knowing how to relax it. This point is crucial to keep calm in certain moments of stress like exams.
- To learn how to get over anxiety and tension.
- To recognise good and bad feelings and learn how to balance that emotions.
- To control impulsiveness.
On the other hand, projects such as workshops can stimulate children and, at the same time, could be adjusted to the daily routine of the class, without setting aside the lesson.
Also practising sports is important as we have said. Nevertheless, in our opinion, it still doesn't have the importance it should have.
All these strategies should be improved along our lives, therefore, as teachers, in collaboration with parents, we should be responsibles of initiating this process.
To conclude this entry, we have also done a slideshare where you can find additional information about this topic.
