Health and Well-Being: Blogging through COVID Together

April 14, 2020

Welcome to the first COVID-19 health and well-being blog post! I am excited to be able to share and practice wellness with all of you through this weekly blog post as we navigate this new way of being and learning together. Health and well–being, has been my passion area for a few years now and I have been reading, learning and doing my best to practice and share what I have learned but now it has become even more essential. How we navigate through this unique time in history and this unique way of learning really matters. This is our opportunity to face this crisis with courage and resilience and to model these skills and practices for our children.   What do we want to remember about this experience when we come out the other side? That is actually a great exercise. If you (or your child) were to write a story right now imaging what you would tell someone in the future about this time, what would that story to be? Hold that thought for a moment. We will come back to the story later, but before we get too far ahead of ourselves, I think it is important to map out the things that will help us create this story of resilience.    

I want to introduce three main components that impact well-being. These will be the areas that we will be digging into more each week and I am hoping we can learn more about each of them and try out some of the practices that go along with them. 

1. Self:  There is so much we can model and teach about how to take care of ourselves.  Teaching children how to take responsibility and control of their own health is one of the big ideas that we can really focus on right now. This is a perfect time for children to learn and experience the fact that health is holistic and each part of health: physical, mental, social and spiritual impacts the other parts. There is so much more we can explore, learn and teach about this together.    
2. Other: We are social beings and have only survived as a species because we have done it together. As we explore well-being, we will explore the importance of belonging and connection to our survival and our success. This will be especially important in this time of physical distancing as we will need to be creative in how we connect and support each other to get through this time together.   
3. System: This one will be interesting at this time as there are so many levels at play here.  Of course, there is the global system and how our country and government are handling things but here we are going to focus more on the systems we have some control and impact on. How do we set up our family systems for success at this time? How do we work together as parents and teachers and workers and all of the various roles we ourselves are juggling all at the same time? How does the system support us? How do we meet the challenges with creativity, compassion and patience?   

Well, that sounds like a lot, but we will work through it one step at a time.  So, let’s get back to the stories we talked about earlier.  After this is all over, we will all have different stories.  Many of the stories we will tell will be stories of really hard things, but hopefully they will also be stories of how we got through this together, the struggles we overcame and the new things we learned and discovered. I hope you will read and struggle along with me on this weekly blog, so we can work creating this story together. We’ve got this! 

Gail Markin

District Teacher for Social Emotional Learning K-12