We all know that there is no tired like teacher tired! We have our own set of challenges. We go home worrying about the students in our class all while taking care of our own families! That is why we need to take time to take care of ourselves! We can not give the best of ourselves if we are not taking care of ourselves!
First, we put together a self-care Facebook group for our staff. On this site we share a variety of topics! We left this as an open forum for everyone to share ideas. We also made a healthy lifestyle thread to help manage and find those ideas in one central location.
Topic Ideas:
Healthy Lifestyle
Goals
Procrastination
Self-Esteem
Self-Care Strategies
Positive Self-Talk
Organizing (Purging Access Things)
Next, we are doing fitness assessments once a month and are offering a group workout right after school for 20 min. The fitness assessment consists of weight, measurements, 1-minute sit-up test, 1-minute push-up (or squats, I let them choose), and the pacer test. I just gave them a small paper to keep their results on and they could store these where they wanted (I included a link to it below).The group workout is just with an interval timer app. The workout is a one minute run followed by one minute of a strength move. We mix it up and use different materials from the P.E. closet. I teach group fitness, so this was simple to implement, but it really would be easy for anyone to implement! There are so many good workouts on Pinterest and ideas! You can mix it up however you see! Maybe Couch to 5k? DVD or YouTube workout in someones classroom?
Then, we plan on having monthly meetings after school. This is going to be kind of like a book club style where we are just sharing what we are doing. We also plan to start with an activity, either these or ones from my friend's book about self-care! We also plan to have outside experts come in to speak with our staff about topics! Our first meeting we will be having another counselor from a school who is trained specifically in yoga for teachers (so cool, right?!) to do a demo and discuss the benefits of yoga. People are often interested in coming to speak if they are able to promote their business
Community Experts to Utilize
Local Parks and Recreation - We are lucky that our city has a wellness specialist on staff and the city often wants to do these as a service to the community.
Gyms
Yoga Studios
Nutrition Specialists
Talk with your staff see who they know or they would recommend!
To organize this we created a team drive on Google and a share Pinterest board. This has helped us to share ideas and to stay organized with the materials and articles we will share. Below I will link a copy of the resources we have collected so far (keep in mind many of these are for our specific town).
These are all just ideas and it is a template for how we do it! Feel free to change up your plan however you would like! If you do start your own self-care initiative or have ideas on what we can add to ours feel free to leave a comment!
