Hello everyone!

Our names are Carolyn and Mytchel and we are excited to say that we have been given the opportunity to participate in a pilot program with the Four Directions Aboriginal Student Center this year with Queen’s Health Outreach. Located on campus, the Four Directions Center is a place devoted to teaching and celebrating the Aboriginal heritage. At Four Directions, we had the opportunity to work with several local high school students, learning about and exploring Aboriginal culture.

Diabetes is an ongoing problem in the Aboriginal community, so our role with QHO has been to educate students at Four Directions about diabetes prevention, treatment, and complications. We approached this topic by generating discussion with the students about how the customs related to Aboriginal culture are applied to the prevalence of diabetes. We also implemented activities to encourage critical thinking about risk reduction strategies that can be incorporated into traditional cultural practices.

Working with students at Four Directions was a rich opportunity for cultural exchange. It is our hope that QHO and Four Directions will be able to maintain this relationship for years to come!

Mytchel & Carolyn 

Hi all,

Our names are Mytchel and Nicole and we teach once a week in the KCVI Street Smart program located in downtown Kingston. The students in this program are working towards completing their high school credits and there are a variety of different students attending each week. During the fall, our lessons were very discussion-based as this is what worked best for the students. We have presented on a range of topics regarding health promotion, including Healthy Eating, Drug Use and Marijuana. In this class, we are able to tailor the discussions to their own personal lives and stories that they share. The teacher, Trina, is extremely knowledgeable about the personal lives of all of her students and is able to offer insight and input that allows the students to stay focused and on-track. So far in the winter semester, we have taught lessons on Physical Activity and Healthy Relationships. For part of our lesson on healthy relationships, we had a list of attributes that described healthy and unhealthy aspects of a relationship – and had the students categorize them and explain why they put it in each category. We then talked about consent, signs of abuse, and what to do after a sexual assault and incorporated local resources. Our future lessons plans include topics such as Pregnancy and Contraceptives. We have really enjoyed teaching in this classroom and think that each student has something unique to learn from our Queen’s Healthy Outreach. We are very appreciative of Trina for allowing us to teach in her classroom and for her on-going support! 

Mytchel & Nicole

Hi everyone!

We’re Madeleine and Hudson and we teach a grade 7/8 split class at Frontenac Public School every Wednesday right after their lunch break.  It is always exciting to see the students run in after their break, and it is sometimes a challenge to try to get them all settled and ready for the lesson.  As a class we have discussed at length substance use and abuse, including alcohol and drug abuse and the effects of smoking.  This seemed to be the topic the students were most interested in.  We have gone over both physical and mental health, and what defines a healthy relationship.  We have done this mainly through a discussion-based lecture, playing games, and showing videos.  Moving forward we plan on starting our sexual education unit starting tomorrow, which should take the next few weeks.  One of our goals going in to the year was to try to develop our students into taking their next step into high school.  It has been great to see the level of personal growth each of our students has gone through so far. At the beginning of the year some of the students were shy and did not raise their hands to answer our questions but now we regularly hang out and talk with the first students in from lunch.  Later this month we are planning on having our outreach day, where we are going to take the students outside of the classroom for some bowling.  Time has flown by and we cannot believe we are down to our last couple of lessons.  We are both really happy with how our classes have gone this year, as we feel the students have grown and learned lots, and so have we with them.

Madeleine and Hudson

Hey there!

Our names are Jonathan and Megan and we teach a grade 5/6 split class at Frontenac Public School every Friday afternoon. Our kids are very energetic and full of bright and complex ideas. Each student brings a unique perspective to this classroom. We’ve covered topics like how to address bullying and cyber bullying, healthy eating with an emphasis on the four food groups, as well as goal setting and self esteem. Additionally, some of our best classes have been on substance use, abuse and addiction and healthy decision making related to alcohol, drugs and cigarettes. During these lessons we could tell that our students were drawing from personal experiences and using their critical thinking skills well. Since many students in this class have difficulty with reading and writing, they love watching and discussing videos, applying their knowledge creatively through comic strips and posters as well as playing games like jeopardy. This week we will be covering mental health and stress management and are looking forward to jumping into a unit on body image and puberty! Working with the kids at Frontenac Public School has been an incredible experience for us. We have seen so much progress from our students in such a short amount of time and have learned so much from them in turn. We look forward to a new opportunity to grow with them each week!

Jonathan and Megan

Hi everyone!

We are Jonathan and Carolyn and we teach at Limestone School. Every week we have the chance to work with an amazing group of students in middle and high school.

Our students tend to be a bit quieter, so we try to include a mix of individual activities and small group discussions in our lessons. So far we’ve learned about healthy lifestyles, body image, values, and goal-setting. The students are witty and thoughtful; they always have new and interesting ideas to share.

During our first lesson on healthy lifestyles, we asked the students to draw pictures of typical “healthy” and “unhealthy” people to gauge the students’ understanding of healthy lifestyles. We were impressed by the students’ varied and creative drawings. One student, however, chose to leave her sheet of paper blank. She explained that it was impossible to judge whether or not a person was healthy based on their physical appearance, sparking an in-depth discussion about body image that extended into the next lesson.

Every week has a new and exciting twist to it. In our most recent lesson on values and goal-setting we ran a simulation of a sinking ship. On the sinking ship each person could take three items from the ship to the deserted island. All the items had a value assigned to them. For example, handy/ creative was assigned to the toolbox. In smaller groups we talked about why each of us chose are items. This simulation was helpful for the students to see how their choices relate back to the values they embody.

This opportunity has been a great way for the kids to open up and learn new information, while it has given us the chance to connect with the students. We have learned so much from these students and we look forward to the rest of the year.

Jonathan and Carolyn

Hi everybody!

We’re Lizzy and Rachel and we teach in the School-to-Community program at QECVI in Kingston.  This group is absolutely wonderful and filled with students aged 14-19. 

Our classes are filled with awesome discussions and conversations with students.  We love making connections and engaging with these students in a real way that makes everyone feel more comfortable in the classroom.  These students are funny and smart with tons of real life experience that brings all of our lesson content to life.  They are extremely eager to learn and we have had a great time watching them grow throughout the year.

Our lessons are filled with videos and activities that help to give students different perspectives and views about various topics.  In our time together, we’ve discussed healthy relationships, consent, online safety, and Snapchat safety.  These lessons have been awesome and our question box is filled with great comments every week.  From week to week we have had more and more questions in the question box, which has brought us joy knowing that our students are beginning to trust us and they are really absorbing the information in our lessons. Throughout the year, we have had time to learn about what type of learning strategies work for our students.

We’ve recently starting discussing sexual health and the anatomy of the body.  In order to start our lessons about sexual health in a light-hearted way, we began with a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3MyLt6l5n0

This is an example of how we integrate multimedia into our lessons to improve understanding.  The students seem to have great interest in this topic. It is one of our last units and we have waited until now to gain more trust and increase comfort levels in the classroom.

The students in our class teach us just as much as we teach them and every session we learn something new about the students. It is wonderful! We love our class and we can’t wait to dive deeper into contraception, STIs, substance abuse, and many other interesting health-based topics. 

Rachel and Lizzy

We are Rachel and Nicole! We spent six week with Mrs. Kirk’s Grade 9 health class and, although our time spent together was short, it was an awesome experience.  The most relevant topics for this group of students were substance abuse and sexual health so this was what we spent our time teaching about!

In our first class, we wanted to make a broad introduction about health to the students.  We discussed what the students thought made a healthy person and how they see health in their daily lives.  This helped us to shape our lessons to cover the most relevant material possible in these students’ lives.  The students really wanted to learn about the different types of drugs, side effects, and what do to in emergency situations related to substance use.  We emphasized the fact that our presence in the classroom was to provide the students with correct information and life skills with which to lead happy and healthy lives.

We had multiple lessons about substance use and abuse covering tobacco, marijuana, alcohol, other drugs and ending with strategies to avoid drug abuse and peer pressure.  We finished the unit with a summarizing game of Jeopardy! and the students were extremely excited for some friendly inter-class competition!

At the end of this unit, we moved into teaching about sexual health.  We discussed male and female anatomy, pregnancy, STIs, and contraceptive options.  The students asked lots of questions and we focused on providing correct information to correct any false myths that were circulating in the classroom.  We provided trustworthy websites for students to access if they had any further questions after our teaching time ended. 

We were extremely proud of the student participation in discussions and class activities throughout the semester.  We felt that this group of students benefitted enormously from the peer education aspect of the QHO program because they felt more comfortable asking questions.  We were very lucky to have been welcomed into this classroom and we wish the QECVI community a future of healthy life choices!

Rachel & Nicole