Educators

If you’re an educator looking for ideas, support, tips and tricks to aid you during the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve put together some resources created by fantastic organisations.

BCH’s School Focused Youth Service was excited to deliver over 400 art activity workbooks and art material packs to 26 local primary and secondary schools last week as part of the Art Connection project.

The very talented staff in the Arts & Wellbeing Team at Ballarat Community Health created 16 art activities for the workbook, based around the philosophy of ‘busy hands, calm mind’. Each activity teaches new skills, inspires creative thinking, relieves stress, gives students’ a sense of achievement, and builds resilience – all whilst reconnecting students with their teachers and peers after a long period of remote learning. The project provides a creative, gentle and encouraging avenue for students to re-connect with school, whilst developing self-expression and imaginative thinking through fun activities.

You can download the full workbook here.

The Professional Learning & Development team at Berry Street is proud to launch its Excellence in Practice Webinars. This is a suite of online learning opportunities to improve the outcomes for the vulnerable children, young people and families you work with, through these uncertain times.

Over the coming months they will offer a range of webinars delivered by Richard Rose, Robert Tucker, Clark Baim, Berry Street Education Leaders, Berry Street’s Take Two Practice Development Team and our Y-Change team.

Videos for Change engage young people from Grades 7 to 12 to create a one-minute video on a social issue they feel passionate about. Past participants have covered issues such as social inclusion, racism, domestic violence, gender equality, LGBTQI rights, and bullying.

Stride provides wellbeing programs for students, as well as an online teacher wellbeing resilience toolbox. This is really worth checking out! They are putting out different modules of the program, which you can check out here: Module one: stretch out of your comfort zone
Module two: trust your instincts
Module three: developing a resilient mindset
Module four: energy management
Module five: nowness
Module six: grit for teachers
Module seven: thankfulness

Andrew Fuller has put together some specific resources in response to COVID-19, including this one for remote learning and this one about how educators can identify mental health concerns in students.

Here is another recent article, provided by Andrew Fuller, about how to transition back to in-school learning. A further piece, which you might find interesting, is this one about How not to get PTSD during COVID-19.

Be You has a range of resources available for educators at their website https://beyou.edu.au/resources/events. Register for upcoming professional development sessions or watch recordings of previous webinars, as well as many other resources.

BeYou are also continuing to offer suicide response support as well as online postvention planning to individual secondary schools. For more information please see here.

The eSafety Commissioner has a range of resources for educators, as well as a specific COVID-19 response. They also have webinars for parents that may be of interest to educators.

DET is also providing current Coronavirus advice.

ABC TV has thousands of curriculum-linked resources for school teachers and students, which are free for anyone to access here.

headspace in Schools is a great resource that offers a range of supports to schools. This program is continuing to operate, utilising various flexible delivery options.

The Victorian Government has partnered with headspace, the National Youth Mental Health Foundation to develop SAFEMinds: Schools And Families Enhancing Minds, a comprehensive learning and resource package that will enhance the capacity of school communities to effectively identify children and young people with early signs of mental health issues, offer school-based interventions and refer appropriately when needed.

Here is a lovely children’s book, Matilda & Theo’s Lost and Found Things, which is about living in the time of coronavirus—a really uplifting little story! Check it out.