Wellness Ideas For Healthier

Schools have an active role in providing and ensuring students’ social, physical, and emotional wellness.

The health and wellness of students contribute to their ability to take advantage of high-quality instruction and reach their full academic potential. Children and young people spend a large part of their time in school. Which is critical for shaping general wellness, including social, physical, and emotional aspects.  This article reviews European and national initiatives that promote the importance of wellness in schools.

Tackling bullying globally – ENABLE

The European Network Against Bullying in Learning and Leisure Spaces ( ENABLE ) was designed to combat and reduce bullying globally but has broader positive effects on young people’s social and emotional Wellness and classroom climate.

The main focus was to increase resilience in youth by combining social and emotional learning (SEL) with peer support strategies. The program aim at young people between 11 and 14 years old. A period in which children learn more about themselves. Test their autonomy and understand their emotions. The previous survey of students showed that one in three did not know that emotions influence reactions, and one in four expressed no affinity for helping behaviors.

The project funds by the European Union’s Daphne Program and ran from 2014 to 2016. It included actions such as a series of webinars. The ENABLE Hackaton, during which students have to design an application or any creative tool that could use against bullying.

The ENABLE methodology was integrated into more than 100 educational centers, reaching more than 15,000 students. The project generated versatile resources for teachers, teacher educators, and parents (in Dutch, Greek, Croatian, French, English, and Danish).

Educational centers for health in Europe: the SHE network

Just work, and no play can lead students to achieve high grades and excellent results. But what about his physical improvement?

Educational Centers for Health in Europe is a network of 45 member countries from the European region. Its interest focused on making health promotion in academic centers an integral part of the development policy in European education.

They define health-promoting schools as schools that care for the health and wellness of all students and staff. To that end, they implement a structured and systematic plan, which includes seven essential components: policies for healthy educational centers, the physical environment of the centers, the social environment of the centers, individual health skills and competencies for action, community links, and health services.

The SHE network promotes research and impacts good practice in school health promotion. Among its resources, the three technical sheets of the SHE network stand out, which analyze the situation of educational centers that promote health, offer scientific evidence that proves the importance of promoting health in academic centers, and provide detailed information on the networks and collaborations in the promotion of school health.

Teachers can also find the guides and tools very useful, which offer valuable information on healthy eating, physical activity, and the prevention of childhood obesity. Publications are available in English, Russian, and Slovenian.

Training students’ attention: Mindfulness in Schools Project

Would you like your students to feel calmer, happier, and more fulfilled to control stress and anxiety or improve their concentration and focus in classes, exams and tests, and sports when they play and listen to others?

Mindfulness has shown its positive effect in all these areas and already actively used in a group of schools. It is a practice that helps create self-awareness at the moment. Therefore, acknowledging and accepting one’s feelings and thoughts, and physical sensations. In short, “mindfulness is alive and knows it.”

However, MiSP (Mindfulness in Schools Project) is a UK-based charity dedicated to promoting the resilience and wellness of young people through mindfulness in schools. MiSP has trained more than 3,200 educators and school workers to transmit mindfulness in schools.

One study revealed that children who participated in the mindfulness program (N=522) reported fewer depressive symptoms, less stress, and greater wellness.