I went big with my post, listing many ideas for implementing a comprehensive school wellness program. Let’s now focus on the elementary.
One primary goal of a wellness program is to help our students THRIVE! To reach this goal, here are six potential steps to follow>
Step 1: Introduction Lessons – What is wellness? What is character? What are Character Strengths?
Step 2: Teachers then teach students the individual Character Strengths that scientific research shows we all have. One approach is for the wellness coach and grade-level teachers to design the scope and sequence of when you will teach each of the strengths. Perhaps in early childhood, only a handful of strengths are introduced, such as emotional and social intelligences, honesty, kindness, and self-control. Teach additional Character Strengths each year so that all the strengths are in place by, say, Grade 3.
Step 3: Teachers then apply the PRIME integration and Secondary strategies listed on this website for each Character Strength to offer many opportunities to practice using the strengths during the year. As students learn each of the strengths, they will grow their understanding by “exercising” them.
Step 4: Teachers then teach students Positive Psychology’s six “pillars.” We use the acronym PERMAH to describe them. Each pillar is a significant category of how we live our lives. Again, it is through scientific research that psychologists concluded that living well within each pillar helps us thrive. The wellness coach works with the grade-level teams to decide the scope and sequence of when individual pillars will be taught. You could start with relationships and aspects of health in the early years, adding on pillars from there.
Step 5: Each student creates a personal wellness plan that lists how they will exercise the Character Strengths within each PERMAH pillar to live more fully and flourish. The wellness plan contains action steps to help students engage with the Character Strengths and PERMAH pillars as a regular part of their lives. It can also be helpful to have students add intentional practices and habits to engage further within each pillar.
Step 6: Once you complete steps 1-5 to bring wellness practices into the lives of our students, we start using the term “wellness toolkit” as an ongoing integration practice. At this point, students develop a language of wellness, further embedding the tenets of Positive Psychology into their life practices and habits.
We use language and references such as
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Which tools can you use from your wellness toolkit to help with….?
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In planning for our field trip this week, which tools from your wellness toolkits can help us prepare for and make the most of our experience?
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Let’s look at your wellness plans to see how you are all doing. Let’s do some self-reflection on our efforts. Which tools from your wellness toolkits are you using most frequently?
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Let’s drill down into your toolkits with the pillar of H for Health. Which tools, as in strengths and practices like diet, sleep, and exercising, are you engaging in? Which habits are helping you engage with this PERMAH pillar?
Additional Step: The Character Strengths are organized into six classes of virtues: Courage | Humanity | Justice | Temperance | Transcendence | Wisdom. In your second year, you could design age-appropriate lessons on values clarification to build on your work from the previous year.
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Pulling from the comprehensive school wellness post, here are a few ideas to further onboard new students, parents, and staff into the program annually.
-New students and parents need to be onboarded annually into the wellness program. The same goes for new staff before their arrival in August for the normal orientation and onboarding program. Providing online tutorials, FAQs, webinars, and other resources through the wellness web portal can help with the process. Design wellness workshops as part of your orientation program for new students before the first day of school. Provide a series of workshops for parents for face to face meetings and for online attendees.
-Design wellness learning opportunities for your parents working with the Parent-Teacher Association (PTA). The PTA can help with the onboarding process for new parents for wellness and other aspects of the school and community culture. If you have a community center on campus, support your PTA in offering book clubs, workshops, small group discussions, etc., on wellness, parenting, and other topics of interest.
-I can say again from experience that the onboarding needs to be scheduled and promoted at the start of the year to continue on a monthly offering new staff and parents opportunities to grow their knowledge of PosPsych with built-in activities to support their living and embedding of wellness principles into their lives.
-The same, of course, needs to happen for students. Schools often offer a start-of-the-year orientation program for new students. Possibly have more than one day of orientation in which you introduce your wellness program. Find ways for your ES homerooms and MS and HS advisory to have start-of-the-year wellness foundational learning opportunities to build foundational knowledge of PosPsych so that the new students can feel comfortable as teachers integrate the Character Strengths and PERMAH in their regular curricula . And just as with the parents, look to have some follow-up orientation get-togethers with your new students to discuss wellness and other topics to help them transition to your school.
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John Mikton recently posted about helping students and parents understand how AI gathers data on them. He listed several resources (provided below) to further understand this process. I made a connection to the multiple literacies of Information and Communication Literacies (ICL) that I often write about. 
school community.
